Have I mentioned lately how much ass Trollbabe kicks for me? If not, it does. Any questions or comments about the following account are more than welcome.
I ran it for about the fourth time last night as a one-shot game for three other Forge members, and it was my best run yet, resulting in three of us deciding to continue on for a short campaign with it. Going in, I wanted to try something different. Inspired by Ron's recent The Pool: Dragons and Jasmine (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6200&highlight=) thread, I did much less GM prep than I normally would have, wanting to see if "letting go" would result in a better session.
It most definitely did. With only a half-page of scribbled notes, the players and I weaved a damn fun tale. My notes consisted of the following backstory:
- The Duke Baldulf is a renowned fox hunter, and is also renowned for his voracious appetite for the ladies.
- His wife, Lady Vivien, is pregnant and is hiding it from him, for it is not his. The Duke cannot have children.
- There has been a silver fox spotted recently, and it is raiding all the chicken coops in the duchy. The Duke, for all his effort, has not been able to catch it. The fox is actually a skin-changer, and is the duke's sensechal, Petrus, who has also impregnated Lady Vivien.
- The Old Lady of the Forest, an ancient troll, has laid a curse on the Duke so that he may never have an heir, as he accidentally killed her one child forty years ago.
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That was all I had (besides a large list of names), but the four non-player characters were used by the players to make this story rock. The Stakes were pretty simple: will the the fox in the duke's henhouse be revealed, and if so, how will the duke react?
The characters
The three players came up with the following characters:
Maevonne, a tall, frightening trollbabe dipped in human magic, but with the uncanny ability to talk to animals. (This ability wasn't really unique to Maevonne, but she utilized it heavily.)
Kleewick, short for a trollbabe at 6' tall, but nearly as wide. Kleewick is a powerful fighter, and is actually a trollbabe from an earlier one-shot I ran, which meant she came with a relationship to the elder of a village in the duchy. (The location of the duchy was never specified, and this was my first GM improvisation, by making it set in the locale of the earlier adventure.)
Yalla, another tall trollbabe, had all the features of a tree, being of great height, willowy, and dressed in green. Her social descriptor was "sexy," and the player definitely played it up.
The game
Here's a shining example of where I go wrong as a GM: I thought the adventure would go something like this:
- Some characters hoof around the countryside looking for a silver fox.
- Others find out that Lady Vivien is pregnant, and investigate either (a) who the father is, or (b) why the Duke can't have a kid.
- Someone finds out the Old Lady of the Forest cursed the duke, and then finds out why.
- It gets all tied up somehow.
Even scheming the lightest timeline in my head was a big mistake. Luckily, my players shocked me out of it.
How things really went down:
- First scene, Yalla goes straight to the Old Lady and finds out she's a troll. Yalla's looking for the Mystic Egg of Whatchamizit and the Old Lady tells her the price for the knowledge of the egg's location: a child.
- Kleewick's quickly involved as well: she's bringing a letter to the duke from her friend Silius, the aforementioned town elder she had a relationship with, and ends up on a hunt for the fox with the duke.
- Maevonne, played by someone I can always trust to make awesome, but bizarre, character choices, starts off talking to a farmer who's had his coop robbed. She gets the first glimpse of the fox by casting a spell to release the one surviving chicken from its fear.
As the game progressed, Yalla makes friends with a group of children and finds out one has no parents. This little four-year-old boy was so frightened by her initial appearance that he wets himself, and her failed attempts to make the boy a new pair of pants makes the children laugh so hard that one ended up telling her a secret: Lady Vivien's having a baby. Yalla's player thought for a while about trying to give the boy, Bjorn, to the Old Lady, but meets his "three moms," Lady Vivien's chambermaids who are raising him.
Meanwhile, Kleewick and Maevonne end up meeting in the forest while looking for the fox, and Kleewick casts a spell on a lodestone to find the beast. Of course, the lodestone points right back towards the duke's manse, so much charging occurs. Maevonne heads off another way, though, and talks to Rushkin the crow, who tells her that a silver fox has been crawling underneath the duke's manor. (Rushkin wins NPC of the night, by the way. He was completely spontaneous and created by the player, but was totally the most fun to play.) Kleewick finds some silver fox hair in the manor's stables, near where Petrus and Lady Vivien just were, and Maevonne talks to Artus, the groundskeeper, who shows her the crawlspace under the manor where she finds a trapdoor leading to Lady Vivien's room.
As far as relationships go, they were sprouting up everywhere: Yalla had a relationship with a little girl, Inge, already, and of course Maevonne had a relationship with Rushkin. The interesting thing is that no re-rolls had occurred so far.
All of that changed in the next bit of the adventure, which I call "the better part."
As night fell, our three trollbabes:
- Kleewick is literally hiding her huge self inside the duke's chicken coop, waiting for a fox.
- Yalla and the chambermaids have decided it would be funny for Yalla to switch places with one of them tonight that the duke is likely to come have sex with.
- Maevonne's holding off for a moment, but plans to confront the Lady Vivien.
The duke does come to Yalla's bed, thinking she's one of the maids. A great part of Trollbabe is the Pace of conflicts, allowing players to decide how much focus they want on an event. In this case, the player chose blow-by-blow: we were going to put the spotlight on this sexual encounter. That's something you don't see in an average game run by me. It was awesome, though. There were a few failed Series, leading to some great blows: the Goal was to get through the whole encounter without the duke knowing what the jig was, so as the duke gets suspicious and starts to run his hands up towards Yalla's horns (a failed Series), Yalla flips him over and ties him to the bed with a scarf (a successful Series).
In the meantime, Kleewick is bursting out of the henhouse after she sees a human hand reach in and steal a chicken. When I say bursting, I mean it: her head pops out the top and she tears through the side, catching up to the man who's now changed into a large silver fox, and then using a re-roll when she failed to keep him down to throw him into a nearby hollowed out stump and sit on him.
Maevonne has slipped Vivien a human truth serum in her tea, which Vivien noticed (a failed Series), but still affected her (a successful Series). As she blurts out the truth of her child's parentage, everyone hears Kleewick yelling. Maevonne, the drugged Lady, Yalla wrapped in a sheet, and the dazed duke in just his pants all come a-runnin', and an eruptions of conflicts ensue as Petrus, the Silver Fox, emerges from the stump as a man, kicks Kleewick in the mouth and knocks her out, calls the bunch of trollbabes liars and schemers, and gets a spell cast on him by Maevonne to reveal the truth. The initial roll fails, and Rushkin makes another appearance on a re-roll, chanting the spell along with her. The re-roll's failed, though, and Petrus transforms again (hey! the spell worked), leaping at Maevonne, knocking her over and eating Rushkin.
By the way, all of above specifically happened because of the rules. Two failed re-rolls leads to trollbabe incapacitation, and any relationships involved get killed (Rushkin.) However, in that case, the GM describes the fate, so I had the spell kind of work, transforming Petrus back into a fox form.
Naked Yalla manages to catch Petrus - after he's attacked by huge enraged chickens, a side-effect of Maevonne's spell gone awry - and the duke nearly kills him before she bargains for his life. He's sentenced to serve Yalla for a year and a day and enter the duchy no more.
The last scene was six months later, as the duke gives Yalla Lady Vivien's newborn child, covered in light fox hair. It's assumed Yalla will take it to the Old Lady and get the duke's curse removed, but we ended it there.
Letting go
That was a wild rush of "what happened." What happened between me and the players, though? Well, I truly let go. Nothing happened as I thought it might, yet all the big conflicts I'd thought about did occur. How come?
Trollbabe is a system engineered to do this, and do it well. By default, the GM narrates character success and the player narrates character failure. This is an insanely powerful tool to let the GM guide the story (by tempering successes in certain directions) while keeping the character protagonized (by letting the players guide the failures in ways they prefer.)
There's not much more to say besides letting go of the reins was a wholly positive experience. The players got to set up what they wanted to focus on (via Pace), make their characters powerful motivators for conflict, and we all had a fantastic time.
Clinton,
Great summary! I'm curious about one thing though.... How exactly did the first session start? What information did you tell the player or how did you frame the opening action? You said that in the first scene Yalla went to the Old Woman and discovered she's a troll. How did Yalla's player know the old woman existed?
Jesse
As we didn't have the normal Trollbabe experience (the players look at a map and say, 'my trollbabe's here' and the GM thinks up some conflict-ridden NPCs), I told the players before play the following:
- In the duchy, there's a duke who's a renowned fox and lady hunter with no heir.
- There's been a large problem with a fox or foxes stealing chickens.
That was about it. Alan, one of the players, said, "I want to go talk to the village's wise woman." Given that, I asked him, "There's a renowned wise woman that lives in the woods, the Old Lady. Would you like to see her, or look for someone in the village?"
He took the bait, and it ran from there.
Wow, that's too funny!
Gotta love the bedroom scene, Ha!
I like this game more and more!
Are you playing it straight, or incorporating Ron's upcoming change to the Social roll? Did you have many multiple Action type Conflicts?
Thanks for posting that, made my night!
I was one of the players (Kleewick)
We had a number of two Action Type rolls, usually of the X + magic variety. In fact it was failure on a double action that resulting in our first instance of a trollbabe getting into real trouble.
One thing I was struck by during play was that in Trollbabe, you are only ever as involved in a situation as you want to be... Until you are injured!
What I mean is this: If an uninjured Trollbabe is willing to accept a failure, she can walk away from any situation she wants to. Only if she cares enough to go for the reroll is anything at risk.
But an injured Trollbabe that is forced into a conflict is going to suffer further injury if she fails her initial roll, or even if she wins the series with a reroll. It seems like in the world of Trollbabe once you've stuck your hand into a situation, the situation sticks to you.
I'm still pondering about what this means for the dynamics of play.
Finally, and interesting note on the dynamics of the pacing rules. Choosing a slower pace boosts your chance of success if it was already > 50%, but lowers it if was originally below 50%.
Quote from: Bob McNamee
Are you playing it straight, or incorporating Ron's upcoming change to the Social roll? Did you have many multiple Action type Conflicts?
I am decidely not a fan of Ron's upcoming change, and hope to maybe change his mind about it. I really like the idea of Social working better than anything else. I totally understand that you can make a "better" character by choosing an exceedingly high or low number, but character balance is the last thing that should be important in this game.
Making Social based off the lower of Fighting or Magic encourages characters with middle-of-the-road numbers, which in many situations equals pretty boring characters.
Hello,
Clinton, by the most remarkable coincidence, I just ran a session of Trollbabe tonight for three players. Time and fatigue won't let me present it all in detail here, but suffice to say there were two trollbabes in one locale and one in another. All the players really seemed to enjoy the scene-cutting across them, especially in tandem with the right/structure of requesting scenes. Two of the players hadn't heard of the game before but took to it immediately. I was especially pleased that people were helpful to others in offering suggestions about narration, but without interfering. Lots of shared creativity that tended to inspire rather than to take over.
I was interested to see that one player played the first genuinely unpleasant trollbabe in my GMing experience. Despite one little glimmer of niceness at one point, she even participated in a murder attempt. I rather enjoyed the failed roll which led to her incapacitation at the climactic scene; it ended up being a "virtue triumphs" story without (a) the trollbabe representing the virtue or (b) me forcing it to turn out that way.
The other two characters also had a fascinating failure, in a scene in which I presented two shaman-type trolls who were casting a spell that would help them out greatly - but the two characters assumed they were foes and attacked them. Many failed dice and checked-off re-rolls later, the characters were rebuffed, which allowed me to turn on the dialogue and for play to resume with an alliance. I was prepared merely to have these two quite useful NPCs to be killed through the players' decision to do so, but the dice (and the players' decisions about risk) said no.
One thing I always forget about in running Trollbabe is to resolve the outcomes of conflicts for the relationship-NPCs. It's a big part of the game's design that the trollbabe often must sacrifice her relationships for her goals, and as I say, I often forget. Very annoying.
I think I prefer the changed Social rules, because it forces more relationships and re-roll items into play. I don't think it necessarily forces more middle-of-the-road characters in the long term, but more playtesting, especially over many adventures, is definitely called for.
Best,
Ron
Hi all,
I played Yalla in Clinton's game.
What struck me was just how much control I had over building a meaningful series of events. I'm not sure how much of what follows showed up in play, but here's some decisions and ideas I experienced interacting with the game.
Clinton had told us the basic elements - the duke, unable to concieve and the egg robberies. At character creation, I decided to play into this with Earth Goddess/Fertility magic as Yalla's organizing theme. I suspected the duke was the werefox and envisioned seducing him into revealing the truth.
Just before play, I got the idea to give myself a mcguffin to chase - a magic stone egg (a fertility totem). So I immediately asked after a wise woman. Clinton surprised me with the old troll's request for a child.
While Wil and James played out the arrival and involvement of their characters, I got the idea for my next scene: it would be ironic if Yalla's next encounter was with a bunch of children playing hide and seek in the woods. Mind you, I wanted to develop Yalla's quest, not resolve it immediately, so I debated with myself whether I should ask for the scene - then I decided to trust our GM to find a complication.
I requested the scene and to my great gratification, I got it. I found it funny that I had started with the intent of a seduction and was now playing motherly games with the village children. In another twist, the GM didn't provide much complication between me and my goal - I found an orphan child after only one conflict roll (helping a girl find her hiding friends).
I had an option at this point to show up in a scene where the other players were helping the Duke hunt the egg-stealer, but decided not to.
At this point the other players thought I'd just kidnap the boy. But I still wanted to confront the Duke, so the next turn I had, I requested a scene at the castle. Yalla arrives with the intent of persuading the Duke to allow the troll-woman to adopt the boy.
I won't go into any more detail, but I got Yalla into the Duke's bedroom, just after the other players had cornered the egg-stealing werefox. It wasn't till that point that I realized my guess about the guilty party was wrong.
Even so, Yalla played a part in bring the Duke and the fox into confrontation. Yalla called on the Earth Mother to make all present speak true (this became a blow-by-blow social and magic conflict where I got injured and burned two rerolls.)
I think I requested all the scenes I played in, except the last one or two which involved the other Trollbabes. Requesting a scene gives an incredible ability to set up the thematic elements one wants for one's personal story. I love it!
Oh, I want to add that Clinton started the game with a simple set of inter-related secrets about four main NPCs. We didn't know of them until the end of our session. At that time, we learned why the Duke couldn't have children. It seems he accidentally killed the troll-woman's only child and she cursed him.
As I see it, Clinton connected me to one of these secrets in my first scene. It attached me to his scenario. It got to the heart of the idea of Trollbabe as bridge between races. And It gave me something really great to play against for the whole evening.
I think "Stakes" in Trollbabe help define the range of available narrative premises in a session, just as the definition of Humaity does in Sorcerer.