[The Shadow of Yesterday] The Sea of Teeth

[Clinton R. Nixon]

This last weekend, I had a few friends down to New Orleans for ClintonCon 2004, my sometimes-annual home convention. We played a ton of great games - see our Burning Wheel thread elsewhere in this forum - but one of the most exciting for me was getting to test out the current version of The Shadow of Yesterday, the game that keeps threatening to make me the "Game Designer of Yesterday."

The short version: it was awesome.

The long version: the game worked well, and I think we all had a good time. Character creation ran into some serious problems: my math on ability distribution was demi-retarded, and we made some quick decisions to simplify it, which made characters more interesting. (By simplifying it, characters came out much harder to diversify initially, thereby focusing their story influence in one area. For the beginning of a game, I think this is good.) Even with the point distribution problems, great characters were made, bouyed by the Secret and Key sub-systems. We ended up with characters that all had a vested interest in other PCs. The characters:

[*] (Player: Wilhelm Fitzpatrick) A prince of Qek who was a diplomat/hostage to a tribe in Khale. (The diplomat/hostage thing, by the way, is so Shadow of Yesterday. I really wanted a fantasy game that emphasized odd cultural practices and this ancient practice of being a person of honor, and a prisoner at the same time, is right on the mark.)
[*] (Player: Matt Wilson) The Khale warrior assigned to guard the Qek prince. One of his Keys was the Key of the Protector assigned to the prince.
[*] (Player: John Harper) An extremely haughty elf, played to the hilt. The best part about the elf, however, was that he was a distant ancestor of the Khale warrior, so he had some wish to help the guy, even though most of him thought the idea was a waste of time, at the least.
[*] (Player: Jared Sorensen) A goblin ship-hand, experienced in shipcraft, climbing, and being a total glutton.
[/list:u]

After some beginning missteps, the game started to run well. I suspect the initial problems may have come from the fact I haven't run a game in a year. The setup was easy: these four are on a ship riding the Sea of Teeth, a major trade route that happens to be the home of many reefs and some fairly nasty storms. They got the double whammy of both pirates and a storm coming in at the same time, but the Goblin Navigator(tm) got them away without too much damage by deftly avoiding a reef and causing the pirates to crash upon it.

The characters' ship had taken damage, and with a storm on, they sailed as little as they could, anchoring in a nearby island's harbor. In a bit of brilliance, they decided to eliminate the pirates by hiding in their own ship and leaving it in the water as a tasty prize. Meanwhile, the goblin had gone out to sea in order to gorge himself on fresh fish, and encountered the pirate captain, a giant Vulfen (wolf-man). This couldn't have worked out better - the goblin gave up the information on where the ship was, the pirates attacked, and were soundly routed.

This was our first chance to try out the "Bringing Down the Pain" subsystem of The Shadow of Yesterday. This works like a charm, as we found, but there were minor problems. Currently when a character is "bloodied" (wounded), things go downhill pretty quick. By allowing for a quick change of intention in this case, characters have a better chance of survival. In addition, players should be able to call for some Pain whenever they are involved in a challenge, not just when they lose one, which is how the rules currently read. This allows for major villains that one must actually have extended resolution with in order to get rid of permanently.

The adventure continued on with the exploration of the nearby island for repair supplies. This was your standard wild-pig-fight, meet-nice-hunter-on-uninhabited-island, fight-out-he-is-a-hunter-of-men sort of affair, and we can skip to the interesting part when the three characters that were all involved with each other sit down for dinner with the man-hunter. The elf, a poisons expert, was asked by the hunter to season the meat - with poison! A quick Past Lives check for the elf told him more than he wanted to know. Not only was the poison a good way to knock a human out, but he'd met the hunter before. The two humans were unaware, and we suddenly had a situation in which many XP were to be gained by using the characters' keys. The elf originally did poison the meat - and spiked the wine with a stimulant to counter-act it, but had second thoughts, especially when he found that the hunter had killed him in a past life after buying this special poison from him. Another major fight was on, with the elf vs. hunter action happening on the other side of a locked door from the Qek prince vs. enormous mastiff fight. Some more quick routing went down, and the three escaped a life of slavery.

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All in all, this was a great game for me. I did learn several problems with the system which were, fortunately, not extremely damaging and can be easily fixed. What did excite me was the "accidental narrativism" that happened. After a wild pig fight, and some pirate action, one of the players said, "Hey, when did this turn all narrativist?" as the elf had the decision on whether the other characters lived and died in his hands. This is really what I was looking for in this design: a game that supported Good-Ole Fantasy (tm) while injecting hot liquid story all up in that turkey.

[Matt Wilson]

The reward system in TSOY is nothing less than brilliant. I almost hung up my game design pen and said "why bother."

For those who aren't familiar with it, it's like this:

Choose from a big-ass list of "keys," which describe various circumstances under which a character earns XP. If you, for example, take the "key of making sandwiches," you would earn XP whenever your character makes a really good sandwich.

Okay, that one I just made up, but there's loads of them, and they mean that the player decides what's going to be important in the game, and gets rewarded for doing it. Take a key that has to do with protecting someone, and you get XP every time your character does protection-related stuff. Take a key that has to do with being greedy, and you gain XP for amassing wealth.

It gets really interesting when you have a situation where, say, Wilhelm has the key of defeating the evil orcs who killed his family, and I have the key of protecting the helpless, and we find a wounded orc in the woods. Someone's going to get XP out of that situation, but not everyone.

You can also force a dramatic change in a character's life by "buying off" a key. Don't want to be a greedy bastard? Give away all your possessions. You lose the key and gain a huge sum of XP, with which you can buy a new key for the character.

[ethan_greer]

Hell, yeah. I've been wondering when TSoY was going to get some more stage time. Now I am well pleased. Thanks for the write-up.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Choose from a big-ass list of "keys," which describe various circumstances under which a character earns XP. If you, for example, take the "key of making sandwiches," you would earn XP whenever your character makes a really good sandwich.

Buyoff: Take a vow to never make another sandwich, or any foodstuff consisting of meat within bread. Gain 10 XP. (See the character of Arthur Dent, Mostly Harmless.)

[xiombarg]

So, Clinton, have the current tweaks from this play made it onto the web?

[Clinton R. Nixon]

So, Clinton, have the current tweaks from this play made it onto the web?

Not quite yet. They'll be on the wiki in about a week, hopefully.

If you're really jonesing, they'll be here first: https://opensvn.csie.org/anvilwerks/The_Shadow_of_Yesterday/. I'm not promising any certain date on that, either, though.

[Matt Wilson]

Hey Prez:

I forgot to mention: John and I were having lunch yesterday and talking about the abilities. To clarify my position after play, I'm fine with the number to choose from, but I'd prefer to start with a smaller number on the charsheet. 6/5/4 is just a bit too much on top of freebies.

Maybe 5/4/3 or 4/3/2?

[rafial]

6/5/4 is just a bit too much on top of freebies.

I'll have to respectfully disagree...  I like the fact that my freshly generated character did not feel like boob right out of the gate, but rather a competent warrior with some chiefly flavor skills.  At the same time, I didn't get everything I wanted during character creation, I did have to make some choices in the B and C categories about what parts of my character concept I wanted to emphasize.

Okay, I suppose I could be persuaded that 5/4/3 might be a little "leaner and meaner" but I also liked the fact that my mostly badass warrior could afford to take "Story Telling".

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Just to note - the changes are up at the aforementioned URL. (Which is a Subversion repository, if that means anything to you, and you want to scan the actual changes.)

[joshua neff]

That sounds really cool, Clinton. I think TSOY has loads of potential to be a brilliant RPG. I agree with Matt that the reward system is fantastic. I'll check out the changes. The only real thing holding me back from running it myself is that I still don't feel like I have a good handle on the setting. Mostly minor details, though.