[Niche Engine] goes Burning Empires

[Eero Tuovinen]

So, playtested Paul's Niche Engine. There were four of us, me and three teenagers. Haven't had strictly regular gaming lately, so I've just called the teens to set something up when I felt like playing. This time I offered Niche Engine for two reasons:
- I was curious about the system. Creating something that would make use of the extensive setting prose of traditional games on my shelves is something I've been fiddling with myself for years.
- I have this Finnish old-skool game called Heimot ("Tribes") that was published this summer. I'm supposed to play the game with its own system in January, but I figured that it wouldn't hurt to put it through the Niche Engine wringer first.

One of the teenagers, Sipi, is someone I'd characterize an accomplice in initiating and planning my play; he's going to join me and Sami in GMing Heimot later in January, for instance. I had given him the Heimot rulebook earlier to study for the purpose. The other two have also been regular in many of the games I've ran, so they weren't exactly strangers to my habit of running half-baked games.

We started the session with an explanation of the Setting and the Circumstances I had, as per the rules. I hadn't written anything down, so it was all verbal. At first the players perused the book for a bit while I talked, but later I took the book and simply read relevant passages for everybody. Here's a short paraphrase:

Circumstances

Heimot is a game with a very cliched scifi setting. There used to be this large Company that ruled the human space, but it was brought down by terrorists. The modus operandi here has been pretty much to cram all nerd favourites into one setting: up northeast here on this map are several worlds that Aliens of giger fame (called Crickets) conquered and ate before mysteriously stopping. Down southeast there's a Jabba-the-hut empire. There's also a planet where the Predators come from as well as other such wacky planets, and the history of the setting is best paraphrased as "Hyperion happened 500 years ago", including artificial intelligences, jump gates, influential religions and all that.

Now, everybody should be right at home here. There are a bunch of tribes and such, but we're mainly interested in this one planet, Bauland. It's the center of the Bauman tribe, which is basically the "German merchants" tribe, allied with the "Spartan warrior" tribe of Saratoga. <Read the general info on Baumans and Bauland.> So the Baumans are very industrious, but they also have an organized crime problem. The problem is reflected in our situation here: president Hans Kortig, the electory ruler of Bauland (next in influence only to the Emperor Augustus Bernard-Hayes III) has been politically compromised as the indiscretions of his personal life have fallen into the hands of enemies. Specifically, the Defector agent Tanhauser and his Konfederaziya ally Jorg Hrutzev. The latter is in it only for the money, but the former has a dark secret: I'm thinking that he's basicly your run-of-the-mill chaos cultist from Warhammer, and his agenda is to call the Crickets, the Alien knockoffs, to Bauland to eat it. We're not that interested in the why of it, as far as I'm concerned Tanhauser can just be cuckoo in the head. The moral vacuum required by Paul in his rules here is all about President Kortig, who is ready to cooperate to save his political career. <Read a long bit about the Defectors and a short bit about the Konfederaziya; the latter is basicly "The Russian mob land", but the Defectors take us a good long while to go through, as they're apparently the center of some metaplot the designer didn't include in the book. Most of the stuff concerning them is either vague or contradictory, they're a popular peace movement, alien collaborator conspiracy, bloodthirsty human warlords and super spy terrorists at the same time, with five hundred years of history. Should be interesting to play with.>

Now, let us also posit a fourth named NPC, Lamia Santonius, an admiral of the Saratogan navy. Let's say that she's currently in a holding pattern in the Bauland solar system, waiting to open her sealed orders. Those orders, when opened, will instruct her to bomb the planet and save Baumans from the Cricket infestation; where the orders come from and whether Saratoga is conspiring against its erstwhile Bauman allies remains to be seen.

***
So yes, I pretty much lifted my Circumstances from Burning Empires. Felt appropriate, and saved me some thinking. We took an hour in going through the Circumstances all told, mainly thanks to an exhaustive analysis of the Defectors (they are one of those "NPC factions" you get in these games, even holding their own slice of space in the northwestern corner of the map; except, they're also obviously at the center of the dire prophecies the designer included). We also fiddled with the Circumstances cooperatively as we went through them and found possible inconsistencies in what I had prepared. The final understanding was that Defector Tanhauser had brought Baumans technological data that would allow the reconstruction of the Warp Gates (which Defectors had destroyed in a series of terrorist attacks during the Company era); unfortunately the energies used in the construction would lure the Crickets to the planet. (The connection between the Warp Gates and Crickets was, I think, completely of our devising; the setting material suggests that the Crickets were awakened by genetic manipulation that awakened psychic potential in some part of humanity.) After explaining the Circumstances Conclusion was obvious:

Conclusion

Crickets will eat Bauland.

So we were playing for the fate of the planet, analogous to how Burning Empires works. All told, creating the Circumstances and Conclusion was pretty fun, as it gave the setting (itself just an unordered bunch of cliches) some backbone. I'm especially fond of the analysis one player offered after we'd spent fifteen minutes going through everything the book tells us about the mysterious Defectors: they're, quite obviously, Communists! The Defectors of the setting are defined by the very doublethink on the part of the author that is so usual to anybody trying to consider historical communism as a coherent, single entity. In that light it's not suprising at all that the Defectors could be peaceful Harmonists (their own name for the movement), super-spies, bloodthirsty warlords, Hitler-level mass murderers, alien collaborators and the secret society behind the last thousand years of history at the same time.

Next step, we started character generation with Niches. The problems started to crop up at this point, because there is no word for "Niche" in the roleplaying meaning in Finnish. I tried explaining what it means to the players, but while they have played some trad games, even D&D, I don't think they've ever encountered the idea of Niche protection in their play. An alien idea for gamers used to considering setting adherence and player autonomy paramount, I imagine. I ended up translating Niche as "Position" and comparing it to a formal character class.

Annotations: Paul's right, the Conclusion probably is a somewhat narrow base. We managed it by stretching as necessary, though. A much larger problem in perception was that Niche and Annotations are so similar that any given aspect of the character could easily fit in either. Not necessarily an enduring problem, but still something.

Characters

Felix Himmelman
A cynical space pirate, who takes on even awkward jobs for big money. He has a competent crew. A long-standing secret is that he is actually an ancient from the times of the Company, held alive by long-ago genetherapy.
- A fiddled gen-key allows free actions in Bauland. (Gen-key: a central concept of the setting wherein all Company technology was tied into genetic permits; currently the Tribes are reigned by an expansive caste system predicated on preserving these gen-keys.)
- Was made a Seer during the Company era. (Seers are psychics specifically developed to combat the psychically active Crickets.)
World: 3
Flesh: 2
Devil: 2

Irvan Sebter
A high-caste mob (Konfederaziya, Volk family) member. On a honey-moon with his wife Clara, incognito. Knows President Kortig from the past.
- Hates the Bauman monoculture.
- Fought against the Crickets before.
World: 2
Flesh: 4
Devil: 1

Jason Protomakteus
Adopted from the Bauman tribe to Saratoga after his parents were killed. Fleet lieutenant in the Saratogan navy intelligence.
- Secret assignment from the Technodome in Bauland. (Technodome: the mysterious organization fostering Company era technology and artificial intelligences.)
- Original parents from Bauland.
World: 2
Flesh: 1
Devil: 4

We had a fair amount of back-and-forth among the group about the different characters. While there is some degree of twinkery evident in the contributions of some players, I think they all had their hearts in the right place about the dramatic goals, nerdy as they might be ;)

Actual play

A side-note: we need words to describe the general texture of play. You know how there are a couple or three different "feels" to the play experience, like the sea can have different qualities depending on weather. I'm going to call this time's weather "rough"; a bit of tiredness after the extented character brewing, some side distractions (we played around the living-room table, with children and television in the same room) and perhaps frustration with the rules contributed to make the actual fiction a bit thin and bouncy in the way you get when the players are not invested or comfortable enough to make inventive contributions. So instead they fall back on rote, and you get this oft-humorous, rough play style that still keeps the boat afloat but feels tiring in itself.

As characterized above, the actual play wasn't anything to write home about. We did get the rough framework of a situation up, and I think it would have cohered with time into something interesting, but our time-constraint definitely did it in. I doubt that we'll be continuing the story, considering the approaching Christmas-time and the gaming-pause it causes.

To tell shortly of the events: the mob guy and Protomakteus, above, got into a dramatic fight soon after the start of the game, when I dropped the idea that the mob guy killed his parents on Protomakteus. He went rogue at that point and started stalking Sebter with high-tech help he got from Technodome. Some fighting, dramatic reveals of his past and agonizing by Sebter over whether to kill the boy he specifically saved last time around. Meanwhile Himmelman found out about the Saratogan navy hiding near the Bauman homeworld, went to find out about it from his mob contacts in Bauland and ended up participating in a Cricket smuggling ring for high profits. However, his ancient programmed instincts against the Crickets kicked in, he exploded the cargo and ended up in a bind with the mob over it.

Hmm... now that I look at it after a well-slept night, it wasn't that bad. Could be interesting to continue, especially after a bit of restructuring of some muddled parts of the fiction I never properly understood. Pretty typical for a first session of a non-coordinated long-term game. A definite problem was that I myself expected the game to be much more to the point than it proved to be: in actual fact most conflicts end up doing nothing resource-wise (it is pretty easy to win conflicts by dicing, after all is said and done), and plenty of time can be burned in maneuvering the characters into position for actually addressing the Conclusion. I don't know if we should have started closer to the Conclusion, but then, the players weren't mechanically ready to address it at the end of the session, either: we started with two Inevitability (as per the formula I speculated about in the other thread), and during the game gained two points of Imperative and no characters at zero ability yet (although there was one point loss). In conclusion I'd say that this is not the one-session game I expected to be playing.

As an aside, there is no explicit rules for player versus player conflict. I played it according to the round structure I adopted: the first conflict goes to the player whose turn it actually is, and if there are more conflicts between the two, each player gets to roll in turn. Worked well enough, and could prove interesting.

Other than the above, personally my biggest gripe with the game is the lack of concrete support for anything. It is certainly a very light-weight system, felt like playing the Pool. I'd be tempted to say that it's just not fit for my tastes, except that I have a tendency to get to like stuff with a bit of time. In practice I just went with strong scene framing played in turns, with a drive towards conflict in each scene. Jumpy and rough, but worked. Problem was, it just wasn't that interesting to play, as most of the conflict outcomes were basicly "oh, you win, let's narrate", with not much progress on the mechanical level. Felt like not having any direction after I've been playing many games with more structure.

Hmm... that's that for now. Have to get going. Questions?