[S/lay] Fear of Death Crystallized

[Eero Tuovinen]

We played more S/lay today with Tommi, making it the first "second session" with the same person in the series. Here are the past reports:
In the Refugium (with Tommi)
The Tulpa (with Peitsa)
The Red Desert of the Mad Lord (with Sami)

This time Tommi was "I" and I was "You". I could have played Musa Legi, my erstwhile and embittered cavalry captain from the session with Sami, but because we had been swinging the prehistorical sensibilities with Tommi last session, I instead opted to create a new character in that spirit. I rather like the outcome:

I am myself. I am canny, brutal, experienced. I laugh at the gods. I delight in life. My foes meet death swiftly. I am an escaped apprentice, defiant and scorned, but armed with the weapon I invented. I am sullen, dirty, small of stature, sinewy, wild-eyed, bare-footed and timid. I am come to the Crystal Court, whose queen remains unknown, hopeless and seeking sanctuary, ambitious for a position of respect.

That doesn't sound much to begin with, but I liked the backstory that Maru developed, as well as his personality - he proved to be sort of a luggage-size teenage Conan, complete with philosophical soliloquys about good living. A combination of headstrong and clueless, but with plenty of heart, if you will.

What I knew about him to start with: Maru had escaped from "Ur, the city of slaves", where he had been apprentice/slave to a cruel master of the Brassmen's Guild, the shadowy organization that controlled metalworking in Ur. He took with him the kusarigama of his own invention, a weapon strange and unnatural to the world.
What I knew about midway through: Maru's kusarigama is called the Moonsickle (a pun in Finnish, as a moon "crescent" is called a "sickle"), and he used stolen meteor iron in the making of the blade. Maru got the inspiration for the weapon from a dream that he believes came from the moon, but as a Brassman he would be forbidden from carrying arms, even if he ever made journeyman.
What I knew by the end: Maru believes that "Marumaru", a savage nomad chieftain who rocked the walls of Ur before being humbled upon them, was his father. When his folly was doubted, Maru slew his master's bull with a strike from the weighted chain of the Moonsickle, precipitating his escape from Ur. He seems to have an instinctive vision, even feverish, of how the weapon should be used, and he insists on a warrior's life despite not seeming particularly suited for it. Despite his small stature, Maru proved a horrifying monster of carnage when he finally got his opportunity.

In other words, Maru's clearly from the "cool stuff is cool and signature arms are cooler" school of pulp fantasy :D

Tommi's vision of the Crystal Court was a city perched upon the white salt sands of a long-lost seabed. A city built entirely of crystals, strangely percolating and replicating to provide sustenance and shelter for the population. The city was ruled by a monarch chosen by the city - or so the citizens believed, anyway.

The Monster was queen Antimyra, the supposed chosen ruler of the Crystal Court. In reality she had imprisoned the real queen in the dungeons, and forced her to use her crystal magics to Antimyra's benefit. She was basically a political monster, one who would kill slowly, with deceit, in a civilized manner, mostly using her guards and servants to do the deed.

The Lover was Emeria, the imprisoned Queen of the Court. She was in fact a crystal simulacrum of the long-dead Emeria, the queen who feared death and therefore had a crystal duplicate of herself created, imbuing her spirit in living mineral to reign forever. She was carnally innocent, yet politically manipulative; knowledgeable of her world, but forbidden to associate with anyone outside her dungeons.

I thought the ambivalent set-up with the two queens pretty interesting. I even grew somewhat fond of Emeria over the course of the story, as she helped Maru, and one good turn apparently deserves another in my mind. She remained a distant and mysterious character, though, as we only met at the very end. Maru was quite distressed to discover that the lady was actually a monster of crystal herself; he ultimately ended up refusing her on that ground, being much too young and parochial to understand or appreciate transhumanism.

Most of the story centered on Maru's attempt to attract the attention of the court, and the subsequent prison break and his developing conviction that the haughty Queen would have to pay for stealing Moonsickle from him, just as his master had tried to do in Ur. Because I rule in the dicing department, Maru mostly got his way in the climax, too: queen Antimyra dead by his hand, and Maru himself unharmed. As the fictional positioning didn't indicate any harm to the Lover, Emeria got to live another day. However, Maru abandoned her with confused adolescent feelings after he discovered that she was really crystal all the way through. At the end Maru disparaged the ruling priesthood of the city for their willingness to be ruled by a construct of magic, and left the Crystal Court disappointed, despite having gotten exactly what he was seeking: he could have remained behind after slaying the false queen, to rule with Emeria.

Maru after the maintenance phase:

I am myself. I am canny, brutal, experienced. I laugh at the gods. I delight in life. My foes meet death swiftly. I am a young vagabond, defiantly following the dream of my father. My weapon Moonsickle is singular upon this world, for she was bestowed upon me by the Moon; I am lethal in an entirely unique manner while wielding it, and such is known to all lands bordering the white desert. I am infamous as the instigator of the Crystal Troubles, even if I did not benefit of the upheaval myself. I am small for a man, young-faced, unwashed and brazen, challenging any who dare cross my dream.

The strategic lesson (remembering that I see defining the Lover as a strategic layer) of the session: "I" can sweeten the pot for "You" by adding incentives like getting to be a king, and that sort of thing sure does play a part in determining whether you'll stay or leave. (I don't know if Tommi chose the Lover with an eye towards Maru's goal of gaining recognition and prestige - if so, well played in that regard.) However, in this case Tommi fumbled the ball by making Emeria a non-human robot being - instant turn-off for the poor unsophisticated Maru. The romance might theoretically have been recovered by revealing the truth earlier and giving Emeria more room to define herself as a post-human female who might enjoy the company of a young and brash bravo like Maru, but as it was Maru never accepted her sufficiently to even consider it.

In general I find in this series that the Lover should almost always get more screen-time; only in "The Tulpa" did she get enough, and even there one might well say that I wasted that time with unnecessary psychological finesse, when I should've been doing exposition earlier.

[Tommi Horttana]

This was my first time as "I", and I'm a bit surprised how nicely it went. Even though I have 15 years of GMing experience, I worried a bit about what I could create on the spot based on Eero's choices. But it turns out having a clear starting point (the description of the location) and goals (creating a monster and a lover) make it much easier than just inventing an interesting scenario out of nothing. Yet I still found myself teetering about many core aspects about the setting while the play was already underway. (Do they import food or do they grow it in the city? Do they have a military or does Antimyra stay in control solely through the city itself?) But the genre turned out to be a good match to this kind of playing as I could just accept some outlandish ideas (like them eating some refined forms of crystal in the shape of fruits etc.).

I don't think I played all that goal-orientedly, though. My main focus was in creating an interesting lover and monster pair, and didn't think that much about what would make this character stay with the lover. I did consider what would make the lover interesting, in narrative terms, though, by considering Maru's goal (wants respect, so lover if one who can get him respect if he helps her) and what I knew about his past. As he had invented that weapon and was kind of scrawny, I figured Eero probably wanted to play him as an inventor or otherwise "technical" person (by the standards of the era), so a city "AI" that needed someone to free her would be interesting. Eero ended up playing him as more of a straightforward violent person, though.

Initially my vision was that Emeria needed an outside inventor to free herself from the dungeons where she was being held captive. There were none inside the city as Antimyra kept new ideas strictly under her control. Emeria was being tortured by Antimyra's "techie high priests", forced to do the false queens bidding as she controlled all the crystal in the city. She was only able to do things subtly and unnoticed, like letting the outsider through the gate, helping her escape his cell and guiding him to the underground dungeon where she was being held. Firstly, I had figured she'd ask Maru to do something complicated, but when I learned more of Eero's character, and the time pressure from the die roll arms race was getting imminent, I made it easier to free her in the end (though I guess based on Eero's choices, I could have made her remain trapped somehow even though Antimyra was killed).

But all in all, it was interesting and entertaining. I think one more factor that made it easier for me to do this was that it's a two-player game, so even a slightly slower thinking person like me always has the necessary time to think of the next thing.

[Tommi Horttana]

One more thing I'd like to add is that I think the rules make it a bit difficult to slow down the story for a quiet scene or two (say, with the lover) once the contest has started. This is because both players have the incentive to keep doing very forward-moving acts in order to keep up the other with the dice. In a way, any scene of quiet intermission you introduce, is a lost opportunity to grow your die pile.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Good points, Tommi. I thought that we played pretty well together, clear improvement from last time. I think the game took something like 2-3 hours in total - we started before six and ended after eight, anyway. I also liked playing a character again, it's pretty fun to create these pulp fantasy personalities. I wouldn't mind seeing more adventures from Maru, I suspect that he'll have to grow up pretty quickly and learn to take some responsibility; also figure out what's the deal with his incipient moon-worshipping superstitions and presumed tribal nomad heritage.

An interesting feature that has repeated consistently while playing the game: "I" very rarely gets the measure of the "You" character from the character creation process, despite the fact that "You" isn't actually actively hiding anything. The ways players take inspiration from the same details are so different: I can totally see how Tommi would have expected my character to be more of an intellectual type, what with "inventing" a new sort of weapon and belonging to a technical guild, but then my vision of the city of Ur (where Maru was from) was quite primal to begin with, and then I latched on the idea that Maru actually wanted to be a prestigious warrior, not a member of the technocracy. That all built up into a vision of a feverish quester who believes that this new weapon of his is more of a divine inspiration than a result of mechanical genius.

A second session for the same character should reasonably be different, simply because "I" has taken the measure of the character in the first session, at least to some degree.

Regarding the race to the finish in the Match, it's interesting; there is a clear incentive to keep up the pressure when you're the GM, as you can only get so many dice before the end. The character player basically determines the pace, as when he relaxes and skips the dice on his Go, that signals the GM that he may do so as well. On the other hand, the game has appropriate reward cycles so that you don't really need to feel like you ever need to compromise your vision just to win the Match: just respect the fiction you see, skip the dice whenever the positioning indicates that you should, and let the mechanics take care of themselves. The players in this type of game aren't actually trying to win the mechanical match so much as to merely play their characters: "You" is trying to figure out what his character desires, "I" is making the Monster implacable and the Lover desirable. Whether you win or lose on the dice doesn't matter because there are no stakes in a conventional sense to it - everybody wins if the game is played with flair, so we can't really say that a player has a motivation to "win" on the dice. Just the same as it is in Zombie Cinema, where you're supposedly "trying to escape from the zombies", but really that's just an organizing principle we use to set up the actual story game.

[Tommi Horttana]

True about winning the Match not really being the priority. Still, I always feel a bit like I'm playing the game "wrong" if I lag behind on stack size. It's not so important who wins the match, but you feel you need to give your best effort. Kind of like in recreational sports.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi! I'm really glad

Eero, never trade heroes across multiple partners of play.

I'll look forward to play continuing. I'm confident both of you will find multiple opportunities to enjoy Goes without dice involved. As a technical point, every Go must be forward-moving, always ... but that is wholly independent of whether the hero is acting toward his or her Goal, and of whether the Monster is attacking the hero. So you can have a hell of a lot of forward-moving action without the dice involved. Perhaps another way to say it is, don't confound "forward-moving" with "adding dice," or really, anything to do with the mechanics of the Match at all.

Best, Ron

[Tommi Horttana]

I have one question, Ron: How strictly do you think we should interpret whether some action by "You" is an action towards their goal (and hence worth a die)? In both our games, we've allowed some actions to escape imprisonment to count, on the basis that they need to get out of imprisonment in order to reach their goal. Same could be said about actions made to fight the monster - we haven't had many asymmetric exchanges where only the monster gets dice for the fight, even if killing the monster wasn't the main character's goal (but obviously, the goal cannot be reached if you're dead). I wonder, though, if it's a bit too easy and adds dies too easily in the player's pile.

[Ron Edwards]

I agree that those instances are not worthy of rolling a die. The list in the rules is a pretty good guide. Merely getting out of a prison cell isn't seeking the goal, for instance.

Sometimes the "you" player will be a bit strapped to bring in the Goal. My standout example comes from my Basilisk Knight adventure, in which Maura hammered me so terribly with that fucking hydra that I did not conceive a way to "retrieve my brother's body." In retrospect, that was unimaginative of me - nothing stopped me from identifying him accidentally strapped to the hydra's own body, like Ahab's to Moby Dick, or simply coming across the body lying there during the fight and taking a moment to hoist it on my hero's shoulders.

For example, Vashe, another hero described at the gallery, was penned politely but unequivocally in the guest chamber of a high, guarded tower - so I narrated that a serving-person brought him the southern general's battle-mask, working off the fact that Vashe was a rogue noble who'd been leading an unsuccessful peasants'-and-villagers' revolt for years.

None of this is to say that the "you" player has to grab at the Goal every time, as we've been saying. I'm merely clarifying that when and if you do, there's no real constraint against doing so even sometimes in quite trying fictional circumstances.

Eero, a thought for you, and I'm perfectly willing to think that I may be off-base ... try not to "take care" of the other player. You don't have to tune any particular setting or adventure to his or her hero; there's nothing at all in your work that needs to take anything about the character into account. That does change over time, especially with the Lover(s), and also with recurring Monsters who take on quite a powerful plot role, but really, at the beginning, please yourself and stay with that. The "you" player makes up the Goal and is primarily responsible for getting and defining it, so it's not like you have to work to engage them.

Best, Ron