[Circle of Hands] Kickstart begins March 15

[glandis]

Admitted up front - this is an entirely personal response that might have zero carry-over to others, but in case it does - I'm gonna go ahead and mention it.  My concern on reading the info-dump was that I almost gave up with a "too dark - I probably wouldn't get anyone to play that" reaction before reaching the info about the Circle and what you actually DO in the setting/circumstance. The preview moves the Circle more front-and-center, but if I quibble ... is "gutsy" a strong-enough, um, positive word in the opening sentence?  Does "stark, iron, smeared, bleeding, charred, and cruel" need a um, "determined/resolute/dedicated" attribute for the PCs in that stark etc. environment? Don't get me wrong, I love the pull-no-punches color, but as a selling point to most folks I play with, the "you are the guys and gals trying - against fierce circumstance - to put some hope into the despair" would be vital. As would the "you might not succeed, at least not as well as/in the way you wanted", but I'm not yet sure if the vibe I get from the text includes enough "you get to try and fix/deal with this shit" vibe.

I can accept "fuck, Gordon, the selling point here is the grit", and on the whole I think the preview gives the full picture eventually, but - maybe, for some folks, putting a little more "light(of a sort)-against-the-darkness" right in the opening would keep them from giving up before they see that it's there.

[glandis]

Oh, more personal reaction, fine by me if it's ignored I just don't want to regret not mentioning it: the Rbaja deadlive art is fine - and that an Rbaja deadlive is something that exists is cool. But purely as Kickstart/promo impress-me art, it's a bit underwhelming to my eyes. The skeletal lizardhorse in the video was more grabby.

[Rafu]

Ron, sorry for sounding obnoxious, as I wasn't meaning to! Nor did I want to school you about licensing, nor to descend into an attack/defense mode of discussion. I blame my imperfect proficiency of English as a second language for all of that.
I completely agree with you (not that you need my agreement!) that it's only and purely a marketing thing, and not of course a game design thing, concerning Circle of Hands, and I'm not trying to affect your judgment any particular way — Sorry for making it sound otherwise, that would be obnoxious indeed.
The reason I was moved to comment that way is that I read your posts as carrying the assumption that whomever suggested "OGL" licensing in the first place was necessarily confused about copyright and licensing - interested in working with your mechanics, not your actual text. It didn't feel to me like that necessarily had to be the case, so... Well, I possibly misread your assumptions, for which I apologize.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Gordon,

I'll tweak the text a bit. I agree that "gutsy" isn't the word for that spot, too. The deadalive sketch is a placeholder for its final version or for another illustration depending on what artists toss my way.

Your point about hope is interesting. There are two points about Circle of Hands which are probably not well suited to the Kickstarter promotion, much as the nuances of Humanity were not suitable to the early promotion of Sorcerer.

1. Hope isn't in the fiction of this game. The player-characters are in the position of seeking social justice without really knowing what it is. They have not even been indoctrinated in a code or belief. Instead, they have completely, experientially rejected the magical war and have dedicated their lives to defying it, which as it happens, has turned into leveling the social class structure which they have always experienced as no less than the air they breathed.

2. The slightly-vague missions which define each adventure succeed by default. This isn't a "can you complete the mission" game but rather a "what did you go through during the mission" game. It's possible for the missions to fail, but mainly through bad luck or very bad judgment; most if not all of them succeed, and that success is actually not even played, most of the time. The climax of play is not the success or failure of the mission, but instead the height of the characters' experiences there.

Putting these two things together: if anyone has hope, it's the players - hope that the magical war can be somehow brought to an end, hope that this immiserated society has some kind of chance for change. The general if not 100% success of the missions lays at least some foundation for that hope. By contrast, the characters may exemplify that hope, but they don't have the vocabulary to express it, to conceive of it, or even to feel it. They empowered by gray magic, by their own physical prowess, and by their willingness to rack their bodies.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Rafu,

My initial post definitely pushed "critical" into the realm of "opinionated," so I apologize too.

Best, Ron

[Judd]

So the players are seeking justice in a world that has never shown any examples of what a just world would look like?

What do you mean when you describe the missions as vague?

After reading what you wrote, I picture a world unbalanced by this war between two types of magic, a war the players reject out of hand and this imbalance throughout history has created all of these barrows, ruins and dark places on the edge for the players to delve into for the glory of their newfound king and this crucible will be what scars them into the people who will possibly change the world somehow.

Feel free to reply with, "Judd, just wait until you get the PDF, please," which is fine.

[Ron Edwards]

I'm happy to adjust what you're seeing into what I'd like to say. It might help a bit with what I'm posting and how I'll promote during the campaign, so this is valuable.

1. "Seeking justice" isn't a good description from the point of view of the Circle knights. They're fighting against Rbaja and Amboriyon, and otherwise stabilizing the new king's rule or relations with other people. From the point of view of the players, well, I don't know. To a great extent that will be up to them.

2. "Vague" was a bad word choice for promotional purposes. The knights are working with limited information, one of 1-3 components that went into preparing the adventure, and little knowledge of the specific dynamics at that location. There's no pre-adventure investigation, intelligence work, or briefing. Therefore they arrive, and then have a wide-open range of how they assess the situation and what they want to do about it. It's up to them to decide what actions will best work toward their general mandate, and as I tried to describe above, the whole mission isn't made or broken by "making the wrong choice" or anything like that.

Your general picture isn't bad at all! "Throughout history" maybe isn't quite right, although since the characters and culture in general are deeply uneducated, they might see it that way. I see it as an area that used to be a pretty normal part of a much larger land-and-sea complex of continents, but has become isolated for at least a couple of centuries. Maybe it was on the outer reaches of an empire which has turned its attention to some other direction. Maybe there was a disaster of some kind. Whether the current magical war caused the isolation, or resulted from it, I don't know and don't care. Foreigners certainly still contact and trade with the parts of the Crescent land far outside of the player-character's range of action, but no one travels deep into it from elsewhere, these days.

I've taken some pains with ethnicity and customs to show that although the culture and people's appearance is quite visually distinctive, evidence of prior multicultural travel/contact is unmistakable, as is the evidence of a prior ethnic cleansing from long, long ago.

[Judd]

Sounds neat. I'm intrigued.

Boy king or young man king or we-won't-see-him-so-what-does-it-matter king?

I'd love to hear a bit more about the magic and spell lists of if it is helpful to go over it.

[Ron Edwards]

The text says "young king," and also briefly mentions that he's aided by a wizard who has never "leveled up" in either black or white magic. (System-wise, that means he would always have cast enough black magic to counteract his buildup of white magic and vice versa, which would have to be done in the extreme short term.) It also presumes a fairly intense if short period during which a whole lot of powerful people in Rolke were killed, exiled, or changed their ways, such that the influences of warring wizards were brought to practically zero.

So, young king, advisor wizard, militant and proactive followers with a circular motif - but that's exactly as far as the Arthuriana goes, because nothing else in the setting is like literary Arthurian motifs or narratives.

The home-base is never played, the king and wizard are never seen and are not NPCs, the situation back at home is never described or alluded to. The player-characters (twice the number of people at the table) are the inner veteran core of the Circle, but other Circle knights, who presumably exist, younger and/or more recent, are never observed in play or even mentioned. All adventures begin with a group of Circle knights, one per player, already on their way somewhere.

In case the players/characters concept hasn't been clear, let's say you and I are in a role-playing group, and I'm the GM, with a total of five people in it. The first session, we get together and each of us, me included, makes up two characters. So that's ten characters, who are our Circle. Each session after that, we play an adventure, and each adventure, the four players each choose any Circle knight from the Circle to play. Two minor rules for that: (i) the first adventure, play one of the ones you made up; (ii) you can't play the same character twice in a row.

Magic: spells are either white or black, and rated from 1 to 3 points. So that's 6 categories of spell (black 1-3, white 1-3), with approximately 14 spells in each. The number is (i) the points of Brawn you spend to cast the spell and (ii) the number of color points you fill in for your little color point diagram on the character sheet. You can see an example of (ii) in the video. The total number of color points you can have is 9, after that, the colors start to cancel each other, and if you end up with 9 of one single color, stuff happens - not necessary punitive, but really stuff.

Wizard characters know every single one of the spells. All of them. Non-wizards know 5 points of spells which must include both white and black.

[Judd]

2. "Vague" was a bad word choice for promotional purposes. The knights are working with limited information, one of 1-3 components that went into preparing the adventure, and little knowledge of the specific dynamics at that location. There's no pre-adventure investigation, intelligence work, or briefing. Therefore they arrive, and then have a wide-open range of how they assess the situation and what they want to do about it. It's up to them to decide what actions will best work toward their general mandate, and as I tried to describe above, the whole mission isn't made or broken by "making the wrong choice" or anything like that.

Circle knights are thrust into dangerous situations on limited, maybe even faulty information, without the time or resources to seek more before being throwing themselves into peril. There aren't wrong answers but there certainly are answers with consequences.

No poorly written read-the-GM's-mind-pre-plotted module stuff...I gotcha.

The sharing of characters reminds me of that interesting part of Ars Magica, where the players share the frogs in a big pool (I think...might be making that up).

Any particular bibliography for this one (that isn't already in S&S)?

What would some sample missions be?

• Delve into the barrow of a white magic wizard who was rendered into a "perfect" being and buried in this holy state.
  
  Visit a local bandit lord to make diplomatic overtures for the king
  
  Go slit the throat of a merchant who is profiting off of the war and has begun to use his resources to make the conflict bloodier.

[glandis]

Ron,

On the missions and success: yeah, I think I did gather that the missions per se would tend to have positive results, but I'm assuming that big-picture success - does it actually MATTER that the Circle completes the missions? - is less certain. So to my eye that is in the current description, just a little more hidden than maybe you'd want.

I think the players having the hope rather than the characters is also like that - there in the current text if a little obscured - but ... I entirely see that the fiction requires the characters to NOT have hope in anything like the way the players might. I'm not sure I know many RPG groups where some glimmer of hope wouldn't show up in a couple of the characters, though. I can imagine the game design helping stifle that, but if the description could somehow evoke the inchoate longing of the characters, and if the game actually has room for the chance that that longing might develop even a little bit within the fiction, it might be a selling point to make sure that is communicated in the Kickstart.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Gordon & Judd,

Thank you! You're both on top of a lot of this and helping me process it. But you're also both making my head hurt a little, and I don't know if it's because I'm explaining something wrong or if you are both doing something weird with what you're receiving. Let's see where I get, and I hope that working through it some more will help me in the writing.

JUDD

Circle knights are thrust into dangerous situations on limited, maybe even faulty information, without the time or resources to seek more before being throwing themselves into peril. There aren't wrong answers but there certainly are answers with consequences.

The "even faulty information" phrasing kicks off alarm bells from 25 years of bad Shadowrun scenarios: we're supposed to figure out whether what we were told is totally true, mostly true, mostly a lie, or totally a lie. That's not how this works. Instead, the opening information is true. There may be more information, and what you have isn't detailed, but it's not a lie.

"Thrust" isn't the right word either because joining the Circle and doing stuff with your fellow Circle members are voluntary. These guys aren't the Green Berets. No command center sifted the available information and decided what they needed to know and what they didn't. It's not 3:16; they aren't out there in the depths of space addled by propaganda and with no other choice but to go.

I'm pretty sure that grogs didn't get traded around from player to player in Ars Magica. I think the biggie was that some people played wizards and some played grogs, which at the time seemed like a really big deal. I have always found, though, that Ars Magica is a slippery game to talk about – the various editions are apparently quite different, and it seems to mutate drastically at individual tables.

Any particular bibliography for this one (that isn't already in S&S)?

Not too much overlap with Sorcerer & Sword! I'm drawing more on non-fantasy stuff like Zoe Oldenburg's The World is Not Enough and Henryk Sienkiewycz' With Fire and Sword, and listing titles, but not pushing the lit class material as hard as I do in some other titles.

Delve into the barrow of a white magic wizard who was rendered into a "perfect" being and buried in this holy state.

Visit a local bandit lord to make diplomatic overtures for the king

Those are both pretty good. The first would be "hidden knowledge" and "Amboriyon interference." The second would be "opportunity for Rolke." But both are phrased too directively: go and do this, like an assignment. It's more like word got around that there's this bandit lord, or everyone knows that, or some guy showed up talking about it, and some of the Circle said, "Hey, sounds like a good opportunity, let's go."

Go slit the throat of a merchant who is profiting off of the war and has begun to use his resources to make the conflict bloodier.

Nope. That's a military-style mission assignment. I am beginning to think the word "mission" is so terribly specific in the hobby that I need something else. "Errand" would be great in its classical meaning, but has become trivialized, "errand boy," for instance.

GORDON

...  but I'm assuming that big-picture success - does it actually MATTER that the Circle completes the missions? - is less certain. So to my eye that is in the current description, just a little more hidden than maybe you'd want.

The outcomes of the missions relative to the fate of the new king in Rolke, and to the setting in general, are simply not relevant. As I said, the players may hope, and play itself, and the GM's opinion aside from being merely a fellow player, have no weight at all.

I think the players having the hope rather than the characters is also like that - there in the current text if a little obscured - but ... I entirely see that the fiction requires the characters to NOT have hope in anything like the way the players might. I'm not sure I know many RPG groups where some glimmer of hope wouldn't show up in a couple of the characters, though. I can imagine the game design helping stifle that, but if the description could somehow evoke the inchoate longing of the characters, and if the game actually has room for the chance that that longing might develop even a little bit within the fiction, it might be a selling point to make sure that is communicated in the Kickstart.

You lost me, badly. I didn't say anything about glimmers of hope among the characters not showing up. If any such thing emerges, there's nothing wrong with that. As I see it, "actually [having] room for the chance that that longing might develop even a little bit within the fiction" Is a feature of the game as written right now. That concept informs as much of the text as possible.

I currently think trying to bring this forward and clarifying it will not serve the crowdfunding well. I think the crowdfunding has to rely on fucking-cool bones-broken spear-combat black-and-white-magic gritty talk.

Best, Ron

[glandis]

Thanks Ron - I think the headaches are mostly just internet communication. By "does it matter" I didn't mean to the king/kingdom, necessarily - though it's interesting that you say as a fact of game design missions can't matter there. I was thinking mostly of mattering to the character development and/or the on-player impact, which (I guess I assume) is always uncertain. Does that put us on the same page?

And, "they don't have the vocabulary to express it, to conceive of it, or even to feel it," in the absence of some "but maybe they'll find/make something kinda like it" left me concerned that glimmers showing up would be "doing it wrong" somehow. I think my concern is that that absence might cost you customers. That if the internet communication which is the crowdfunding leaves a "Revel in the grit! - That's all there is to it!" vibe - it might lose some funders.

Now, obviously I AM seeing something more than just "revel in the grit", the grit that is there is flat-out awesome, and I'm just one reaction - but my instinct is to include just a bit more of the, um, more-than-that. Just a bit, and in just the right way (which hell if I know how to do, and even thinking about how seems presumptuous when you're the guy with the vision).

- edited to fix italics format - RE

[Judd]

Missions
More cool shit for missions, less verbs telling the players what to do, how to react or how to do it. Gotcha.

ArM
I think grogs were supposed to be thrown into the middle of the table like a pool of characters anyone could grab but no matter, I don't want to get bogged down with other games.

[Moreno R.]

I'm pretty sure that grogs didn't get traded around from player to player in Ars Magica. I think the biggie was that some people played wizards and some played grogs, which at the time seemed like a really big deal. I have always found, though, that Ars Magica is a slippery game to talk about – the various editions are apparently quite different, and it seems to mutate drastically at individual tables.

Nit-picker's corner: In Ars Magica the "default" (I think in every edition, but I did not check, this is what I remember) is that: (1) every players has a Mage character, (2) every player has a companion (important not-mage characters tied to the covenant and the order by alliance and loyalty: head of the guards, knight, famous outlaw, bishop, etc.), and (3) all the rest of the characters in the Covenant are grogs and are played "commonly" by everybody. They can change hands even during an adventure (so that in every scene the players can be active even if they have not one of their character present, by "using" one of the grog, just for that scene)

In every "adventure" you can play ONE of your principal characters (the Mage or the companion) and how many grogs you like. (I think that at least one edition had as a possibility to play ONLY grogs in an adventure, and to have one or more grogs "tied" to a specific player and playable only by that player. We played like this, with a lot of "personal grogs", because many players did not want to study all the rules for magi and preferred to play grogs, and I seems to recall it was not a house rule: Ron seems to remember this version, so probably we do remember that rule)

Real "troupe play" went even more over the edge with this: rotating GMs and players playing other characters in scenes, even not Grogs. (so that I as GM could assign any character in any scene to any player). I could never make the rotating GMs bit work, but I had a lot of fun assigning characters in that way (an a lot of frustration, too, depending on the specific player... some played these characters even better than their PC, and enriched the game, others... not)

Sorry about this digression, but this was too good an occasion for my occasional soapbox about "Ars Magica: incoherent but still the most innovative game of the '80s".

Go slit the throat of a merchant who is profiting off of the war and has begun to use his resources to make the conflict bloodier.

Nope. That's a military-style mission assignment. I am beginning to think the word "mission" is so terribly specific in the hobby that I need something else. "Errand" would be great in its classical meaning, but has become trivialized, "errand boy," for instance.

"Delving", "Adventure", "going", "episode", "venture", "job", "saga", or even world-specific terms, that have no meaning (or a totally different meaning) in English so that you can define them as you want in your game.

QUESTION: there is some sort of "end game" hardwired in the rules (apart from "everybody is dead", I mean) for the entire campaign, or not?

SUGGESTION: I think you should preface all the other informations about the game with something like "you play a awesome bad-ass warrior with the powers of heaven and hell bent to his will, in a dark, cruel and dangerous world". THAT should get the people to get interested and read the rest....