Hello all

Look at this S/lay w/me orgy in the forum, everybody's jumping in! Watch out for this heavy-weight!

I had parts of this saved up since ages, and just never finished it. I thought we'd play some more, but in the end we somehow never did. Anyway, Sylvie and I played S/lay w/me, starting three years ago... We played six times over almost six months I'd say, each session taking roughly three hours. Since our memories are so fucking blurry, but we wanted to play again, we created a new character for Sylvie last Sunday and played by the lake-side. We probably won't be taking Glavni back, since he comes with all this backstory attached, half of which we don't remember. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Glavni Kolodvor
I am lamed and sick, but my iron will commands even the dead. I ride an undead deer and walk with a cane.
I described him as having an almost joyful sleepy face, exceptionally pale, two inch blonde hair. He wears very stiff and tight light beige clothing, with a straight collar, strong shoulder pads. There's a chain attached to one end of his cane, from which a thurible burning incense hangs (he needs to inhale this stuff to keep going).

Mador Elipse
I am a hunted outlaw, hardened and bitter, but I still hope. I can become invisible and I'm handsome.
Sylvie didn't describe him much for starters, except for him being a cool warrior with a big sword. I was a bit suspicious of the invisibility power at first thought, but then again, why not. It's a great asset in D&D, but in S/lay w/me it's just colour.


Chapter 1. Glavni the whisperer
For the first adventure, Sylvie plays "I". I give her the situation "The battlefield a few days after." and she starts thinking. She describes a huge clearing in a forest, in which a battle had taken place. Most of the clearing is littered with decaying bodies, but a camp is on the border of the clearing and is inhabited. Sylvie reveals that the victors are actually letting the corpses to rot as a humiliation to the defeated, but a furious and small young lady keeps trying to come back to the battlefield to bury her father, the king Mitia. Up to now, the captain of the guard, Sovok, had only decided to keep her at bay, refusing to harm her because of her noble status. Since she relentlessly comes back... he's hesitating to kill her anyway. She's being brought to captain Sovok as Glavni asks for the permission to look for the corpse of a fallen magi, Kalmah the Perfumer. The princess, Edina, is mad at Sovok and things go rowdy. Glavni takes her up under his responsibility and they walk out. The soldiers are a bit anxious at what will come from this and they keep watch.
Glavni and Edina talk a bit, and Glavni agrees to help her. He calls out to the dead, demanding that Kalmah arise and come to him. He also calls for the king. Two corpses rise from the battlefield, and march to meet up with the two living humans and the undead stag. Captain Sovok understands what is happening, and orders his archers to start shooting, while he prepares a few horse riders to go out and meet with the transgressors.
Glavni manages to speak with Kalmah, Edina spends some time speaking with her father, but it is not clear what they talk about. The situation becomes pressing, Glavni grabs Edina and they just barely manage to escape the horse riders. It's not clear that Edina wanted to be saved, but she's so exhausted she just falls asleep. Glavni is injured by an arrow to his lungs though: I breathe uneasily.
I achieved my goal, so I gain social power... I know the names of the living. (Sylvie always asked me to come up with the names, so I actually had Glavni call everybody he met by name without having been introduced beforehand.)

This was Sylvie's first time playing the game, and we had to stop for a short while at some point, because she wasn't understanding how she could reconcile her preparation (heavily based on one of her favourite tragedies, Antigone, as rewritten by French dramatist Anouilh) with the forward making statements I held at each one of my Goes. We quickly hashed out how things worked in this game, she loosened her preparation and play has just been awesome since then!


Chapter 2. The Crystal Court
Sylvie gave me the "Crystal Court, whose queen remains unknown", and I went with a very Polaris-like description of a deserted crystal castle under a starry night-sky. Mador enters the castle and is welcomed by a beautiful young woman, who presents herself as being the servant of the royal family. She's dressed almost the same way as Glavni. Together they march through mirroring hallways and majestic rooms. Mador asks for an audience with the queen (his goal is to find her and confess a crime), but the servant just shows him to a room and leaves him. From there, Mador looks through the window unto a court with people dancing and an orchestra playing. He tries to get out, but of course he gets lost. He encounters statues of ancient heroes in fighting pose. He finds the servant again, but she refuses to show him to the queen and tries to seduce him instead. Playing with her feelings, Mador manages to push deeper into the castle. At some point she becomes upset and leaves him again. He moves onward and finds an intriguing crystal which seems to show him the way. He continues until he happens upon a chamber, where the exact replica of the servant's body lays on a bed of ice. The servant appears again, and tries to shut Mador's eyes, to hide the resting lady from his sight. She pushes him against the wall, kisses him passionately and they make love. Her skin is glacial against his warm body, and frost starts creeping up his body. But he holds on and at the climax the servant melts away. The woman lying on the bed wakes up, and Mador leaves with her.

This was my first try at playing a Lover Monster, and I'm actually quite satisfied. Sylvie defeated the Monster and added the sentence I am able to read the crystal stone and see danger coming, fended off the freezing wound Mador could have contracted, failed her goal... so she still doesn't know who the Crystal Queen is, but Mador is running off, not with her servant, but her daughter as it happens to be, named Nastia.

Chapter 3. Pity is not love
This chapter got really heavy. I chose "The clean free air of the mountains" and Sylvie started describing a range of extremely steep mountains, a very narrow valley, and a village. Glavni arrives there on his good old stag, carrying Edina in its antlers, his goal is to find the Shaman of the Snows who could heal his chest wound.
The villagers invite the two adventurers to a ritual cleansing before going higher into the mountains, which are the Gods' realm. As Edina and Glavni ride on, they do not talk much. At nightfall, they rest in some rocky shelter, from which they can still see the night sky. From two constellations an intense play of light manifests, and a man and a woman appear. The ghostly figures float to the ground, never quite touching it, and introduce themselves as the First God and his wife, Imi. Glavni tells them about his business, and Imi decides to guide them to the Shaman's abode.
On the following day, the three continue, but a storm seems to be brewing in the valley below, and rising up to meet them. This storm is in fact King Mitia's ghost, really pissed off that he did not get buried properly. Glavni keeps him at bay thanks to some dodgy herbs he throws into his thurible. The three wanderers continue, Imi doesn't seem to take offence at this ghost trespassing on her domain. Alas, King Mitia manages to penetrate the smoke screen and take possession of Edina (his daughter). She goes wild, sits up and stabs Glavni with a dagger. He manages to knock her unconscious with his thurible and thus trap Mitia in her body, for a while. As they cannot continue like this, Imi and Glavni talk and then I'm not quite sure how it happens, but Imi becomes material and they actually have sex. It is established that Edina's head wound and/or possession is going to be fatal to her...

Now I did a weird thing. I was pretty hosed with my dice, I had only one pair of good dice. It was impossible to save Edina, heal up the two wounds and defeat King Mitia. So I felt "compelled" to have Glavni get up after having slept with Imi, and start digging a grave. In the Climax, I just bought proper funeral rites for Edina. Therefore, Glavni has to die as well, and I narrate how the Shaman arrives after Glavni was killed by the escaping King Mitia, and how he and a crying Imi bury Glavni beside Edina.

Sylvie and I where quite moved by the story and talked about it. We finally decided that Glavni had mistaken pity for love, which we agreed was quite horrible. A few weeks later, when we played Chapter 4, we decided to retcon Chapter 3. So Glavni does not save Edina, but neither does he bury her. He rides off before meeting the Shaman, King Mitia hot on his trail, Edina's corpse held on the antlers and Imi shining bright in the night sky.


Chapter 4. Temptation
Sylvie chose "The last remaining holy place of the first god." I described a huge flat plain, essentially a desert, with a large cylindrical hole in it, at the bottom of which there was a village with some fields. Mador wanted to find a god who could tell him who the Crystal Queen was. A winding trail allowed access from the plain to below. The village was protected from the searing sun by huge stone trees, but those seemed to be withering.
Mador sets up a tent in the plain, and asks his lover (not the technical Lover this time around), Nastia, to stay there until he returns. He then goes down unnoticed (the bugger gets to get invisible) and scouts out the village. He sees villagers listening to an old man and a young and beautiful priestess, they seem to worry about the withering of the stone trees. A serpent is said to be gnawing away at their roots. Mador goes back up, tells Nastia that he'll be away to slay a monster and get some information from the priestess. Nastia doesn't seem to mind staying up on the plain in a tent.
Mador goes down visible and presents himself to the inhabitants. The priestess tells him about the serpent, and Mador offers to kill it in exchange of the possibility to visit the holy sanctuary. The priestess escorts him to the remote entry of the underground temple, tells him to undress so that she can purify him and... hot fucking ensues. Did I tell you that this guy had barely left his lover #1 a few hours ago?
Anyway. A mythical fight ensues in the underground tunnels, the serpent is a huge barbed serpent with sharp teeth, using the multiple passages to its advantage. Mador manages to kill it somehow, and thus gets to explore the cave. There he finds out all about the myths pertaining to the First God, and apparently the way he cheated on his wife with the Crystal Queen... who was then cursed by said wife (Imi!) I forget exactly how it worked out, and who invented what, but Sylvie finally wrote something to the effect of The First God answers my summons on her sheet, and I have the distinct impression Mador actually did call him, before or after killing the barbed serpent, I forget. So they have this interesting relationship: on the one hand, one could think Mador wants to marry Nastia (who might well be the Crystal Queen and the First God's daughter), but on the other hand, he cheats on Nastia, as the First God did on Imi...


Chapter 5. No regrets
I chose the cemetery that is also a city... and the lover was Nidea (twin sister of Edina, killed by her own former lover and jealous of Edina, so she's more or less a ghost). Glavni kept true to Imi, even though she was shut out of the whole chapter because of some particular setting and character features: we had established that Imi usually moved along like a star, materializing now and then. The cemetery was completely hidden by a ring of trees, which blocked out the sky. Glavni then entered a crypt. No star light, no Imi. Made perfect sense. Sylvie manoeuvred this one intentionally. I found it was a good opportunity to reflect on Glavni's pseudo-relationship with Edina. I essentially remember Glavni walking in the funeral chamber of King Mitias' family. The King's grave was already prepared, but empty. The Queen's tomb was sealed. Edina's of course was wide open, but a fourth one was sealed off: Nidea's. While putting Edina's body in her tomb, Nidea suddenly appears and drags him down through the floor into a black and ghostly world. I remember the image of a long alley, flooded under two-three centimetres of water, bordered by Greek columns, and ghosts popping out of the ground and tugging at Glavni's leg, and then everyone flying into the pitch black sky of this strange place. Maybe I'm making up the water and the Greek columns now, but at least it sounds nice. From our notes, the Monster seemed to have been the Guardian of Hell... and there must have been a confrontation of some sort between Glavni and the ghosts of the two sisters (trying to play on his sense of culpability, love, etc.)
It was actually a powerful chapter in terms of choosing between Imi and Edina, from the little I remember. Retrospectively, I might just decide that Glavni and Imi just settled somewhere after this adventure (she might be his father's ex, depending on what really happened... oh shit!) Still, the question of his illness is not resolved. I believe I managed to bury Edina (appeasing Nidea?) and avoid damage from the Guardian, never touched Nidea and left her behind, but my notes are not very clear. I didn't write down the sentence(s) I might have earned, that's for sure...


Chapter 6. The war machine awakes
For this chapter we decided on conducting a little experiment: no dice. Sylvie wanted to see if we'd be able to handle the outcomes without the help of the dice. Fair enough I though, but we still kept track of the occasions that would grant dice.
Sylvie chose the breeding pits of the Apostate Warriors and Mador went there to find an army to avenge the Crystal Queen... (for those who didn't quite follow, this means killing Imi...) this had my mind racing. Mador is some bad-ass warrior who could turn invisible, he's connected to the Crystal Queen who defied Imi and slept with the First God... The monster and the lover would be the same character, none other than Captain Sovok from chapter 1. He's notably the guy who bred Mador... I quickly suggested that they had been lovers long ago (without revealing that he was also the monster), and Sylvie ran with that. After a first discussion with Sovok, Mador brought Nastia back outside the fortress and returned to finish his business.
I then proceeded with some ultra crappy moves, having Sovok talk about stuff that was supposed to be common knowledge between the two characters, without actually explaining it. Sylvie went along and replied as if Mador knew what was going on (which he did), even though she didn't know what I had in mind. We went so far that I got to the point were essentially Sovok "recovered" semen from Mador and sent him off to the breeding pits to become the father of a new generation of warriors (effectively rendering him useless for months) in order to breed an army to confront the First God. Erm... did Mador really agree to all that? Something to the effect of "bullshit" left my fair Sylvie's lips at that point... and I grasped what had gone wrong. We hit rewind, and started playing again with all the info generated in the first attempt now shared knowledge amongst the two. This time Mador only followed Sovok to a certain point in his plan and then proceeded to kill acolytes, overpower Sovok and (hopefully) make clones out of him.
At the Climax we decided to evaluate what outcomes would be most plausible and what would make for a satisfying ending. Sylvie also told me at this point that she really hated Mador, so I suggested that he stay in this fortress as the new master, with Nastia. We went with that as a basis for deciding the outcomes. At first Sylvie was going to take only good outcomes (after all, putting Sovok in a breeding pit is just as good as imprisoning him permanently), but when I pointed that out, Sylvie reincorporated the fact that Mador had been blinded by a magical light used to spy him even in his invisibility, so she interpreted that as a permanent wound: he was gradually, but swiftly, loosing his sight. She actually preferred ending this chapter and story-line this way. Otherwise we agreed that he achieved the other things: Sovok was imprisoned, Mador was going to have an army of Apostate Warriors and he even took command of the fortress.
I was of course too curious... so I rolled the dice anyway and compared them, and the results indeed pointed to a situation with three pairs of Good Dice. Funny.
There, and that is the end of the adventures of Mador, at least from his point of view. Knowing that he was about to launch an attack to avenge the Crystal Queen (did this mean attacking Imi, who was actually in hiding all this time at Glavni's side?), and that he was Glavni's sister's partner, it might have led to some powerful stuff in Glavni's next adventures...

Thoughts
Okay, I'm kind of bummed that we didn't continue, as this was arguably my favourite "campaign" ever (to be honest, I've only played a few, but this is clearly good). We had to move, Sylvie had to graduate, etc. life got in the way (various games like The Quiet Year, Prosopopée, Mars Colony, Breaking the Ice, Clover, Hot guys making out and various prototypes too, to be honest). Sylvie says she never recalls the events of a game after a few weeks, so she really didn't feel like continuing. Maybe this write-up will have a positive effect on that though! We'll see.

One thing that really grabbed me was the crossing of elements from one adventure to another. Ron warned me about too much planning, and I think after the first adventure we pretty well had understood that notion, and the links happened more out of spontaneous occasions than front-loading. And from that, all kind of crazy shit happened, which I could only dream of in the classical D&D campaign of yore. I was more experienced by then, but then again, Sylvie was not, so I think we can really credit this to S/lay w/me's great design, and particularly the two-player paradigm, which gives both heroes a lot of leeway, more so since they never actually meet. The two-player configuration also allows a particularly quick and powerful tuning of the two players instruments: we hit rewind at least twice for majors portions of the adventure just because we realized that we could do better. I don't see this happening at a classical five player table. To be honest, it's particularly powerful to play with one's partner; there are not many other players I'd trust and know enough to achieve such a nice series of adventures.

As a tangent to the previous paragraph, I want to stress the importance of Colour, not as the "imagined details (...) added in such a way that does not change aspects of action or resolution (...)" [Big Model wiki], but as "what makes character, setting, situation and system vivid." [same reference]. A thing that in my opinion is lacking in the wiki at the time being is why it's such a big deal that things be vivid. Sure, there's the immediate reward of playing a vivid situation, it sure beats playing in a dull or murky situation. But it goes much farther: I'm convinced that Colour is also the seed of inspiration for further events. Had I not described Glavni's clothes in any particular detail, I would not have made the connection between the imagery of the Crystal Court and him, and Nastia would not be his sister. And this family matter became a powerful feature of the backdrop, shaping the adventures in many ways. Once a situation has been made vivid, it's possible to tie details together and weave something greater. At the very least, it makes things so much easier. Of course, a lot of Colour is never reused in that way, but the abundance and vividness of Colour greatly facilitates the improvisation of significant stuff (at the worst, I might have continued describing clothes as a matter of personal interest, thus maintaining a degree of vividness).
Sure, there are lots of techniques that would give family matters an equally important role that it had here, without much Colour being necessary. However, the resolution system in Dirty Secrets becomes much easier to apply if you have lots of Colour already floating about to be able to come up quickly with good explanations for some of the revealed relationships between characters...
Anyway, to me, Colour should not be understood just as an "enhancer" on a very short time scale, but also as the means by which one provides fundamental building blocks on a longer time scale. It still doesn't affect resolution, but it sure can have a major impact on what we're resolving in the first place.



Please, ask me questions about any aspect of this AP. I have the feeling it's a huge info dump, and messy at that, but I'm sure there's lots of material to discuss.

Hi Christoph,

Color: "Yes." What you said, absolutely. This has been my hobby-horse for years. I only sigh at a current Story Games thread titled "Color-first?" in which not one person references my coining of that term and the associated (if incomplete) exercise at the Forge, years ago.

Some striking details: I really like the idea of a romantic partner who follows one's travels as a star, occasionally manifesting. A great image. I also like that weird tubular valley with the village at the bottom - seems like something you'd find drawn by Moebius or Corben.

Of all the things rocketing around in various directions throughout your account, I thought I'd pull one out for first discussion: Sylvie coming to hate her character, Mador. To start, I'll try to summarize his whole story as I understand it. I'm a fan of somewhat disjointed, surreal, freewheeling fantasy, so please don't read this as a big whine that it doesn't make enough sense. I confess, however, that I am in fact a bit confused.

Mador has committed a crime and needs to confess it to the Queen of the Crystal Court, gets blocked repeatedly from finding her at all by a servant, does find a sleeping woman who might be her, finally screws the servant who's blocking him into nothingness, and wakes up the sleeping woman, who leaves with him for some reason, although he still doesn't learn whether this woman, Nastia, is the queen.

Then he goes to the last remaining holy place of the first god, to find a god who can tell him whether Nastia is the queen or not. He comes to a village in the weird landscape there, leaves Nastia on the bus, fucks a priestess, and kills a snake to talk to the first god, successfully.

He then wants to "avenge the Crystal Queen" which means killing the First God's wife-goddess, which totally confuses me again because I can't tell when and how the Crystal Queen died or anything. I'm not being snarky. My phrasing comes from the fact that I'm totally muddled. Apparently the Crystal Queen is the First God's daughter as well as lover, is that right? I don't grasp the Mador-Nastia relationship at all - why does he possibly want to marry her? She does and says aboslutely nothing ... Since Mador achieved his Goal in the second adventure, what does the First God say? Is Nastia the Crystal Queen or not?

I also still don't know what crime Mador was supposed to have committed and his desire to confess it. Well, anyway, he needs an army to avenge the Crystal Queen, so he goes to where they breed the Apostate Warriors. The captain there is his former lover, who ... bred Mador? So this is basically his home? He puts Nastia on the bus again, takes over the joint, and horribly abuses the captain to make lots of warriors in the army. And he stays there as the fortress' ruler, with Nastia. It turns out as well that he's been blinded.

Any brief clarification of the fiction would be appreciated, especially based on my misreading or simply something left out of the above account. Also, I'm focusing on Mador; I know that material from the Glavni's story influenced it, but that's not meaningful to my thoughts of the moment.

Do you want me to speculate, perhaps critically, on some of the mechanical and creative dynamics that might have led to Sylvie's dislike of her own character?

Best, Ron

Hello Ron

Yes, the star as a lover is really cool! Should I open a new thread to talk about Colour or shall we continue here?

I confess my write-up is a bit blurry, as is my memory. I'll try to summarize Mador's story according to your questions, not necessarily in order. Sylvie helped me out some more. She recalled that we tried to play some adventures in the beginning in English, which is harder for us than French. Maybe that's an additional reason why I don't remember everything, because I'm trying to remember it all in French when some of it was in English...

Right, Mador. For some reason, he needs the Crystal Queen's pardon. We don't know what his crime/fault is, and never will. At the Court, Mador only finds the Queen's daughter, Nastia, who had been placed under a spell. He saves her and they leave the Court. Nastia hardly ever speaks, seems to be completely apathetic and boring, yes, but that's also because my memory is faulty. Mador nevertheless takes her with him throughout story two and three (but he always leaves her on the bus, Sylvie told me it was a kind of reflex because she didn't want harm to befall on Nastia), because she's supposed to be able to help him find the Queen.
After killing the snake, he learns, through a mix of dialogue with the First God and the frescoes in the caves, that the Crystal Queen has been cursed by the First God's wife (Imi). Probably we established it was pretty bad (like irreversible), since Mador's next goal is to avenge her.
In the third adventure, Mador goes back to Sovok, who not only is his former lover, but also creator. Mador is an apostate warrior himself, in fact! The idea we had is that these warriors are born adults (that's how Mador can hope to quickly raise an army, btw), by some sort of cloning process that requires the "original" to stay in the breeding pit.

Does that help?

While I'm at it, I'd like to contrast Mador with Sylvie's last character (the one played on the beach). The new character is an ex-slave, tall Viking kind, who has scarabs tattooed over her legs and uses weird mechanical devices in the shape of those insects to achieve her goal. She absolutely loves that one (much more colourful than Mador!) She also loved to play the Lovers for Glavni. It was really Mador who she grew to hate. If you've any thoughts about why our play brought this by, we're all ears.

edited by me to post successfully - RE

Color is awesome, and we can keep talking about it here.

I really like freewheeling, not-always-explained fantasy adventures, to the extent that I think too much modern material suffers from its lucidity. I get your story much better now - I'd already figured out Mador was an Apostate Warrior, which is cool, but knowing that Nastia is the Crystal Queen's daughter makes much more sense. That's all the coherence I need, and the whole "crime" back-story seems fine to leave unknown.

What follows isn't intended as a diagnosis, and your latest post lets me know that it's probably only barely relevant. But some of it might be - I'll shoot for 20%. If it seems to fit even to that extent, then it's worth reflecting on. And there are some rules issues in there too.

1. If one plays a sexually-active hero (male or female) who, over time, does not really match up to one's own standards, then the willing lovers (male or female) of this hero necessarily turn into victims, idiots, bimbos, or sluts, and the hero's dickitude is amplified. Much like Bond girls in the films.

Conversely, if one or another lover is indeed "willing" but is also written/played as a nonentity, then the hero is diminished - actually caught in a no-win trap, because dismissing or marginalizing the Lover while she's so committed to him makes him or her a dick, but since the Lover is so blah, treating him or her as a Lover makes the hero kind of a boob.

In S/Lay w/Me, "the Lover is willing" is a mandated rule. This makes the above issue into a desired feature, or if you will, a deliberate source of problematic tension, in the game, just as it is in the pulp literature.  For instance, Howard could never figure out whether it was "good" for a woman to want to have sex, or whether a genuinely interesting romantic partner had anything useful to contribute to a story beyond dying in it. At least he struggled with the issue rather than default to "no" and "no" with every single story, so Conan never turned into an ultra-dick in the original stories or in the Thomas-written comics, although he certainly did when trapped in the grubby hands of other, considerably worse authors. Getting out of the scrubby/stupid realm is expected in S/Lay w/Me play; whether you can do better than that and rise above the ambiguous/confused realm is one of the demanding questions of its design.

2. A rules point: a Lover never stops being a Lover. So if you bring one along from the past adventure, and here's the new one introduced with this adventure, then there are two Lovers, equally valid as such in the mechanics; you can't speak of one as "the real Lover" and the other not or less so. Merely to continue summarizing the rule: bringing a Lover along contributes a free die at the beginning of the Match in the new story, and the new Lover's dice are handled normally; the story requirements add the constraint of ending with one (who could be either) or none.

The interesting thing is that Mador brought along a character who was not the Lover, merely "someone else." So that throws things askew, rules-wise. I mean, it's allowed, but that character wasn't and isn't a Lover. Does she get retrofitted into Lover status? (possible rules hole there ...) You seem to have done so in terms of "cheating on" and that kind of language, but I don't know if you applied the mechanics/concepts summarized above.

(Points 1 and 2 gain or lose relevance depending on how interesting Nastia was in play, as opposed to the written summary, filtered through memory, difficulty of summary, and translation. if Sylvie elbowed her off-stage constantly to get rid of her, that's one thing; if she

3. Another rules point, which I'm seeing across a lot of reported accounts of play: people are failing the Goal + spending Good Dice to heal damage in order not to die, which bluntly, makes little sense. It's ten times better to buy the Goal, which automatically means surviving the damage (although being wounded). That's definitely receiving attention in the revised text.

4. Tentatively: I'm a little suspicious about "story gaming" without playing S/Lay w/Me. Specifically, "agreement" is not and cannot be part of the S/Lay w/Me mechanics. It might be artifact of your summary, but phrases like "we agreed" and "evaluate [together] what outcomes would be most plausible" and similar language,appear right at points where Sylvie's job was to make the decisions all by herself. Also, it's only barely within the scope of the game for the "I" player to invent back-story like Mador's origin, even to conceive of such a thing and then to pitch it to the other player.

Story-conferencing also carries the potential for overrunning the decisions of the characters in the fictional moment, so that you two might agree that Mador takes Nastia with him, but it isn't played and doesn't emerge from play, so it's effectively a "blindly obeyed" action in fictional terms - i.e., the character is railroaded.

5. When one or more people at the table get really, really invested in constructing a coherent back-story and anticipating that play will incorporate, validate, and move it forward into a gorgeous coherent saga ... well ... basically, that can also run roughshod over the basic act of anyone actually playing their characters. I was intellectually and creatively nurtured by Roy Thomas' stint as the primary writer at Marvel Comics, when he attempted the heroic task of folding Golden Age comics "history" (written in no such spirit) into present-day Silver Age stories - and you can see that effect when I became a Champions GM, because I consistently sacrificed the emergent and creative properties of play for a frenzy of creating and connecting dots in the fictional world. The step from there to casually intruding upon others' authority over their characters during play is very small. I bring this up because as you recognized, you went right over the border of playing Sylvie's character for her, including his back-story and present action.

Again, this isn't supposed to be a laser strike explaining the whole thing. At most I'm noting details that match with observations and experiences from my own play-history, which isn't to claim they actually match in this single case. I'll put this estimage at maybe 20%, articulated like this: If Sylvie had her charactetr de-protagonized out from under her, so she hated playing him (as who would not), as expressed by hating him. (Self-)abusing such characters is common in my experience, ranging from simply killing him off by fiat if possible to accepting and suggesting physical mutilation.

Best, Ron

Hi Ron

(There's a bit before point #3 that's missing.)

Point #1 makes a lot of sense. Concerning point #3: carrying one wound over to the next adventure is pretty annoying but doable, carrying more than one seems crazy. I can understand why one would want to minimize wounds.

Now that you mention it, it's possible I never understood the rule for returning Lovers correctly. We indeed used the bonus die, but I don't think we realized that one can use the new Lover's dice when courting the old Lover (since p.8 one assigns the dice to the Lover just created and then the rules are explained with this Lover in mind.) On pages 24-25 it is stated that there are two Lovers if we bring along the old one, but it doesn't follow from that that the Lover dice are necessarily shared. Perhaps a thing to update in the new write-up, as it'd take only a few words.
This is perhaps why Mador messed around with the new Lovers: it was not clear that Nastia could give him dice, and it's probable I was lucky with my dice, forcing Sylvie to get more of them. When we discussed this point a few days ago, Sylvie conceded that she might have played the relationship to Nastia quite differently with this understanding in minde, since she really liked her and saw her as crucial to Mador's quest.

Concerning points #4 and #5, I concede there might have been some story conferencing. However, I was under the impression that since we quickly shifted to "playing it loose", it'd be alright to imply backstory for the Hero (as the I player) as part of scene framing or establishing the first strokes of the new adventures, but the I player would not interfere with decisions such as how to interact with the Lover, how to pursue his goal and what stuff to buy with his Good Dice. The converse would be true too, probably more readily with a Lover than a Monster.
If I recall correctly, the "agreeing" is not so much about eschewing play, rather than suggesting an idea about the backstory of a character and seeing if it's okay with the other player. In our play of various games where this makes sense, this is becoming more and more like the assertive scene framing you explained to me here here, with the shared understanding that the other can call out something too extreme. I don't think any of this ever intruded into the hard-coded mechanical choices offered by the game (never: "oh, how about you go looking after the Holy Grail?", nor: "I'd love it if the Monster were King Mitias again").
This quick back-and-forth "is this alright?" (even unspoken) was actually an important feature of our play, as we were getting used to playing together, and we saw it as a quality of two player games that was difficult to bring to group play, as the more people are involved, the more disruptive these "okay?" checks are. But I'll be keeping your point in mind, so as not to let ourselves slip into story-conferencing territory.

To summarize, I'd say that #1 (perhaps caused by the misunderstanding of #2!) has something to do with Mador being terminated (he's a sly bastard, and Nastia never got the chance to become very interesting), and maybe we did go a bit too far with story-conferencing moments, although I didn't have the impression that that was an important or problematic aspect of our play. Plus, perhaps Mador was a bit low on Colour, and born more out of the impression Sylvie had of what would be an acceptable character (she had strictly no experience of sword and sorcery, and I hardly more) rather than what she really felt like playing. The adventure with the new heroine for Sylvie was certainly quite different on all these points!


A completely unrelated note: I always seem to have to search throughout the whole book to find where it says what happens on a tie when comparing the sum of our towers. It's explained on p.14 which concerns the end of Gos (i.e., not the end of the Match). On p.16, where there's a subtitle "Ending the Match", it doesn't say what to do with the dice (fair enough, it's about ending the Match, not evaluating the dice). On p.18, we are told to look for Good Dice, and we're told that the Goal is free if we won the match (but it doesn't say, at this point, how this is decided). My logic tells me it should be somewhere on the beginning of p.18. Maybe you can cut it out from p.14.

Hi Christoph,

The rule on the old Lover is the added die at the start of the Match, and no more. You don't use the same rules as for the new Lover.

I have extensively rewritten pp. 18-19, and I think I finally organized and explained it properly. One thing I've found myself doing with the rewrite is addressing the "you" player directly more often, which I didn't do enough in the original, especially at this point.

Best, Ron

Hi Ron

You can get dice by acting towards the Lover. If there are two Lovers because you brought the old one with you, then it doesn't matter which one you sleep with, you get a die (if there is one left for taking). Right?

Incorrect!

The Lover you brought along contributes a die at the beginning of the Match, with no behavioral conditions or stipulations and that is all. The new Lover at that location is played normally, with 1 or 2 dice as designated, gained through the specific acts listed in the rules. The two Lovers are not competing for dice.

Best, Ron

Hmm, okay, so we played correctly and I misunderstood your point about "two Lovers, equally valid as such in the mechanics" in the post from the 29th.

Now, I really wanted to talk about those long-term effects of Colour, but I can't seem to find more to say. Perhaps this: I'm jazzed by the idea that games can reuse the Colour generated in play later on in mechanical ways. It's also found for example in Eero's OSR D&D sandbox campaign with the very specific evolution of characters and groups, all based on what looks like colourful stuff becoming crucial as time goes on (rather than just pulling a prestige class or a +5 vorpal sword out of a splat book and fitting it in ex nihilo). The phrase "transform colour into system" springs to mind, if that's what you were talking about way back.

Yes indeed! It's my mantra: Color + Reward, Color + Reward. And for that to happen, System must function ... that's why it matters.

Um. That's pretty much all I've been trying to say this whole fucking time. (Not that you didn't get that, Christoph, it's just that I can't think of a single post I've made in the past 15 years that wasn't addressing some aspect of it.)

Hi Ron

I only started to understand that since the [Sorcerer] Cascadiapunk post-mortem and the Colour-first character design threads. Even then, I was thinking in terms of "Colour & Reward" as the first post is heavily aimed at initial buy-in by the players and the others were about character creation, and not "Colour & Reward & Colour & Reward & ...", so that I wasn't conceptualizing the long-term effects.

I think the current definition of Colour in the wiki is lacking precisely in this aspect, and before the threads I just mentioned, I think it was pretty difficult to extrapolate it from the explicit discussions people were having on the Forge. For example in Trying to understand where color stops and system begins you said "It's best to think of Color as rarely found on its own, and best recognized as a modifier of something that can be identified as character, setting, situation, or system, or any combination of them." I don't challenge that at all, but it doesn't mention anything about the crucial long term effects, and it's a pretty good instance of the classical definition that people have used on the Forge.

To give credit where it's due, some people described Colour in more functional (?) terms.

Quote from: Ron EdwardsAs for techniques, I suggest that Color is much more profound and problematic than we have previously considered on the Forge. I submit that it is successful only when more than one person is providing it, and that it might be one of the glue-factors that keeps Premise going ... but conversely, it definitely has the potential to take over and actually subvert Premise as well. Tricky stuff.

Just like the other elements, the actual in-play-imagined Color may be facilitated by game design. All the cover features, layout design, graphics, fiction (I use the term loosely), and even stuff like the binding can facilitate Color in actual play, and thus, in shorthand, we can speak of the Color of the RPG design, even though in reality Color is a role-playing phenomenon."

That was way back in Crayola Roleplay (2002), but the post also talks about how the text is written and it's not really about how transformating it can be in play.

Later the same year, in Rewarding Color, one could pick out

Quote from: RonJust like the other elements, the actual in-play-imagined Color may be facilitated by game design. All the cover features, layout design, graphics, fiction (I use the term loosely), and even stuff like the binding can facilitate Color in actual play, and thus, in shorthand, we can speak of the Color of the RPG design, even though in reality Color is a role-playing phenomenon.

and

Quote from: Fang Langfordhe initially leaves us with "How to reward color, and what can this reward be used for?"  The short answer would be "things that can be used to generate color." (...) Shouldn't the reward feed back into that cycle?  Place "color" as the highest goal then think of how you "color" and what you use; that is the currency of reward in a "coloring" game".

Then in 2003, Emily Care mentionned a "psychological" effect "allowing participants to maintain engagement in areas that might otherwise it might be interrupted."

For reference, I tried to bring this topic up in 2009, in [Theory] Let's have a good look at Colour, again, but it was a bit of a painful discussion. To sum it up, Colour doesn't change "how people agree on what happens in play" (the Lumpley Principle), but it inspires people to say what happens in play in the first place (I recognize the wiki entry uses "inspire" too). My 2009 thread has two actual play snippets that kind of describe the same stuff as our S/lay w/me saga. It was Lior Wehrli who pointed out in that thread that Colour inspires us, and Ben Lehman explained how Polaris relies a lot on Colour leading to, or facilitating, ad-hoc decisions (which of course are part of System). The latter point is, I think, a good technical explanation of what happened in S/lay w/me.

Again, I guess this is straightforward for a lot of people familiar with the Big Model, but I've found it to be so powerful in play that I'd like to see if it actually deserves an explicit mention in the wiki. At least I hadn't realized this part reading the old essays and Provisional Glossary, which tend to define Colour by what it doesn't do (affect the how in the Lumpley principle), or by pointing to examples.