[Circle of Hands 1.1] Rules questions about Amboriyon & Rbaja

[John W]

Hi Ron, a few questions as I brush up on Amboriyon and Rbaja zones and related stuff.

Characters with tallies (Chapter 6) are vulnerable to influences from these areas. They may use any of the following benefits at will.
* Physical injury equal to the number of relevant tallies returns as if it were fatigue.

Does this mean that the character heals BQ damage with a 5-minute rest?  The amount of damage healed is [# of tallies] B and [# of tallies] Q?


Under Demons, it says:

Demons must be summoned; they do not emerge spontaneously from Rbaja zones. However, a person in or near such a zone may perform an effective Summon without knowing the spell, as well as Sacrifice, which must be used too.

But it doesn't mention whether these spells cost B, and it doesn't mention Curse.

But, under Direct Contact, it says:

Both the Sacrifice and Curse spells can be cast without spending B.

...but it doesn't mention Summon, and it doesn't say that these spells can be cast without knowledge of magic.

I just want to check: are both of these entries current and complete? 

Also, I notice that the Summon Demon, Summon Avatar, et al spells have been renamed, removing the word "Summon."  This makes the above text confusing.  Sorry, I know you don't want writing feedback right now.

Zombie 1 [needs a new name]

How about 'revenant'?

It obeys its summer's or master's commands unquestioningly, but it is wholly malevolent and unless commanded specifically to kill, becomes inert and useless.
Can it work?

So, if someone summons a zombie, then they can command it without further magic use, but they can only command it to kill; otherwise, it does nothing.  But, someone using Blackspeech can command a zombie to do anything (anything simple, I suppose), whether they were the summoner or not.  Right?

Thanks!
-John

[Ron Edwards]

Hi John,

Boy, all of that is currently a mess. I need to review everything I have about the two kinds of zones and evaluate how I want them to work. At present, based on the playtesting, I've decided that "the dead rise" is becoming way too prevalent and leads to obsessive GM prep - too much gun, as it were. I'm OK with that effect occurring with Distort, but not with any old zone. I also now think free spellcasting near the zones or its equivalent is a bad idea, or if so, then only Curse for Rbaja and the wandering eidolons (not really the summon-type spell) for Amboriyon. The Curse can be cast without knowing it formally, but it costs B - effectively, if you really hate someone and put your guts into it, you can curse them for real.

What I had in mind for the tallies-based healing is this: given physical injury, some degree of it recovers on a scene by scene basis, as if it were spellcasting fatigue. It's not supposed to be more complicated than that. Let me know if that answers your question.

I'd like to avoid all talk of "five minute rests" for the recovery of fatigue. It should be a scene transition issue, more than anything else.

Unfortunately, "revenant" has become too standardized a term in role-playing games, or so I think anyway. I may have to go with it on the basis of etymology, but it would be nice to call them something fun but not so familiar.

My intention regarding commanding them is that they are, straightforwardly, hunter/killers. I never thought of them as working, i.e. laborers - for one thing, avoiding Haitian-izing them, and for another, keeping their malevolence front-and-center. I don't conceive of them as slaves but rather as agents of vicious intent.

My intention with Black Speech and this particular creature is to permit someone who did not summon them direct them to kill, but that's about it, as well as a tiny bit of interaction for horror's sake. (Ghouls and haunts are potentially more flexible in what they can discuss via Black Speech, though. They're psycho but they at least have opinions.)

[John W]

Ok thanks.  It's a little less to work with, but it's nice and consistent.  I'll be guided by that for Tuesday's playtest, and will share my prep and results as usual.

Cheers,
-John

[John W]

Come to think of it: I'm not sure that leaves enough to drive the scenario that I had in mind.  An Rbaja zone outside your village isn't much of an issue anymore, is it?  What's left: walking into the heart of it will annihilate you, on the periphery you can Curse someone, and becoming a Ghoul or Haunt is easier.  Also, things rot, crumble, and disease progresses faster, but those aren't game-mechanical effects.

I was imagining a village in which one or two named NPCs saw clear benefits to living next to an Rbaja zone.  Now that they can't draw undead or demons out of it, I don't think the idea works anymore.

-J

[Ron Edwards]

Really? I find the idea of will-powered Cursing quite attractive. Sometimes.

Consider that particular feature in light of three problematic NPCs. Or in the context of components #1-3.

[Nyhteg]

Being a total etymology geek, I felt compelled to look up 'revenant' .
I'm not sure it's so good a fit actually, unless the zombies in CoH retain the personality of their prior lives.

Wikipedia has a fabulous mention of the Norse take on things:

Similarities are also obvious with the aptrgangr (literally 'again-walker', meaning one who walks after death) of Norse mythology, although the aptrgangr, or draugr, is usually far more powerful, possessing magical abilities and most notably is not confined to a deathlike sleep during the day - although it does usually stay in its burial mound during the daylight hours - and will resist intruders, which renders the destruction of its body a dangerous affair to be undertaken by individual heroes. Consequently, stories involving the aptrgangr often involve direct confrontations with the creature, in which it often reveals to be immune to conventional weapons. Such elements are absent from the revenant lore, where the body is engaged in its inert state in daylight, and rendered harmless

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenant#Comparison_to_other_folkloristic_and_mythological_undead)

The terms would probably need tweaking or making colloquial, but aptgangr and draugr sound like a cool jumping off point for the CoH zombie and lich, to me.

G

[Ron Edwards]

While amending and adding to the manuscript, I realized that in constructing the adventure prep, people are jacking the zones into maximum effect. That means they're ignoring the important instruction not to include components they didn't get.

For example, if you get #6 by itself, or in combination with #1-4, you can't put in any undead, like a ghoul. You don't have a monster. Your choices are demon, wizard, or zone, and you should choose only one. Just because a ghoul finds it easier to rise from its grave in the presence of a zone, doesn't mean you can say that's happened - unless you get #5 as well and decide the monster is a ghoul.

The components are very carefully described toward these ends at this point. You should note well that avatars and undead are in #5, not #7 and #6 respectively.

I'm talking here about prep, not play. If your yoggoth eats someone, then sure, you'll get an undead. If your wizard casts Wrath, then sure, you'll get an Amboriyon zone. But in prep, keep it tight, especially with the zones. Don't treat the word as a "go" button for anything and everything it can do, before play begins. My advice was and is, focus on the NPCs above all.

[Vernon R]

That is one thing I was wondering about myself in the adventure prep I posted here.   I had a Rbaja wizard coming in and trying to take over a village, the other element was Amborijon.  Is having the wizard try and take over adding another element?  Specifically #2 local-power tensions at crisis point.  It sort of seems that way to me now as there definitely was a crisis point and maybe I should have turned the clock back a bit and not have already allowed the wizard to be in such a strong position.

[John W]

Since this game is primarily about people, I think an adventure has to have some interpersonal conflict, no matter what the rolled components are.  Otherwise, it's too clearly good-guy/bad-guy. 

Remember, components are supposed to be somewhat separate, so:
If you just rolled a #6 and/or #7, then the wizard's presence is causing interpersonal conflict, like perhaps a local power struggle.
If you rolled #2 and # 6/7, then there is a local power struggle, period.  And there is a problematic magical presence.  The two components will interact, but each could also stand on its own as a meaty problem.

-J

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

John: almost. Let's see if the following small points can add up to a useful point.

1. Local power tensions are about social rank. Two people who want to kill each other are not a "local power tension." It has to do with social-rank sectors of society, most simply at odds with one another, or perhaps entirely dysfunctional within one rank, which tends to affect the others.

2. Without #2 in the mix, then #6 or #7 by themselves, or in combination, are not allowed to have local power tensions (as defined above) in play as part of prep. The #6 or #7 or both carry soap opera ("problematic NPCs") for sure, but that's not the same thing.

3. The about-people concept is a good one, and it's supposed to be inherent in the prep no matter what through the NPCs associated with the components.

4. A given adventure is not supposed to be hard, medium, or easy in mechanics terms. It's merely interesting and that's all. In the current draft, I refined my language in the prep example to indicate this: that prep is a good example because there's no answer. They don't have to stop any of the NPCs from doing what they're doing. Not one of those NPCs is inclined simply to give them the foreign weapon. Yet every one of the NPCs is potentially interested in what the knights can do for him or her. There's tons of room for judgments and decisions about any of these to arise in play or based on what particular characters think. A knight may be disinclined to let Eckhart keep plundering travelers of their coolest stuff, or maybe none of them care - as far as deals with wyrms go, it's a pretty benign one after all. Toeren isn't a serial killer with the foreign dagger, he merely wants to leave without Eckhart finding out about it, and a knight may find it perfectly reasonable to help him, or maybe one or more of them decide he's a creep.

Add the emergent property of player-character opinions to the emergent property of C vs. 12 rolls, and then you see where the "problem" is, or as I like to call it, the unfortunate crisis. It can't be planned. If you read the prep for that example and immediately start thinking about who will say what, or who's going to be hostile to the knights, or when will Toeren set an ambush for them, or anything like that, then you're writing, and need to backtrack to the point before you did it.

Toward this end, prep needs to be dialed way down from what is apparently expected. I think what I'm seeing in a lot of the playtest reports is that no matter what's rolled, people amp up the prep such that #1 or #2 is in the mix when they weren't included by the rolls. A lot of that might come from Dogs in the Vineyard, where social breakdown is often prepped to be occurring. Add this to the tendency to kitchen-sink #6 and #7 internally, and you end up with #1-7 being present in every adventure.

It's interesting to explain that that player-characters do not have to be solving anyone's personal problem, they do not have to be restoring order and civic decency to a community, and they do not have to root out a specific source of evil. Therefore packing your prep with complex corridors and challenges so one is "prepared" for play to get to those things is unnecessary. My best Circle games so far have been extremely light on the prepped crisis/difficulty compared to most of the stuff I'm seeing here.

NPCs in much traditional prep (the ways to play I talked about in the other thread) are often built as such corridors and challenges. Here, they're not supposed to be. They merely live there, that's all, and they have specific actions and agendas wrapped up with the overall component concept they're built with. In play, relative to the Circle knights, they may be a problem, they may be an opportunity, they may end up being trivial compared to the ascended NPC, or anything, really.

[John W]

This (above) is a great post.  Every time we talk about this, it gets a little clearer for me.  I hope this long conversation spanning several forum threads becomes a mini-essay in the finished text.

"Local power tensions are about social rank."  I'm sure this is the first time you've said this. 

"Soap opera" as a defined term, as a type of (potential) conflict or element of prep, this is new too.  Note to self: "Soap opera" is a problematic NPC.  Local power tensions are not a soap opera.

You prepare a scenario without any attachment to the qualities of what will happen in game.  I mean, yes we GMs shouldn't have any expectation of what will happen, but you go a step further and don't have any expectation about how much will happen, or how big it will happen.  I know you don't like when I call that a zen approach, but it's really zen. 

When I prep a scenario, I don't want to plan what will happen, but I "test" the scenario with "what if a PC does this" or "that" or "the other," I prod the scenario and think about how its parts will react, to make sure that it will deform or slide or push back in interesting ways.  (In a more Sorcerer-like game, this is also how I figure out who and what needs stats, what locations to detail, what items to describe or stat up, etc.)

If you're creating a scenario without thinking at all about how it might respond to the PCs, then how do you know whether you've prepared a good scenario, or how do you know if you're done preparing?  That's what's missing for me.  How do you know?  Instead of thinking about how NPCs might react to the PCs, what should I do to test a drafted scenario?

I think I'm not good at thinking off-screen (extemporaneously), and that's why I want to do that before game night.  I need to already have "Toeren might set up an ambush" in my head, or I'm unlikely to think of it in play, even if it emergently becomes perfectly appropriate.

In Sorcerer terms, I want that list of bangs at my elbow, fully understanding that some or many of them won't get used.

I've only played Dogs once and I've never run it.  To my mind, a problem without an obvious solution is a problem with two or more non-evil people who want different things.  So a Circle of Hands scenario must have interpersonal conflict.  Agree/disagree?

I think I fully understand your previous post, it's an excellent explanation of what you want.  I'm just asking for more info about how to do that - or how to know during prep when I'm doing that.

Thanks,
-J