[Eighth Sea] Seven Sessions

[Vulpinoid]

While the Eighth Sea is available for sale (and has slowly started trickling sales in), it is and always will be in a state of constant revision as I learn new things about it. The following post is more about the things I have learned through recent exposure of the game to another 30 people, on the whole positive but a few negatives that have helped bring some refinements to mind. For this reason it's made more sense for me to add this post to the Playtesting part of the forum.

The Convention
The convention was Sydcon, once a thriving annual convention drawing 300+ visitors in the late 1990s, it had a rough stretch through the early 2000s, during which numbers of 70+ were considered successful...it's now trying to rebuild itself back to the glory days, even if this takes re-invention or something similarly drastic. One of the biggest problems it faces is that Australia's biggest miniatures convention is on at the same time halfway across the city. It is currently run in a Catholic boarding school/college, during school holidays.

After GenCon Oz, I was approached to present my game at Sydcon, so I decided to do so for three reasons. Firstly because I hadn't been to Sydcon since 2000, secondly because I wanted to test out an aspect of the Eighth Sea that didn't really get a chance to be played through at GenCon Oz, thirdly because it was an opportunity to pimp my system and hopefully sell a few copies.

The Set Up
The Eighth Sea is always played in five acts: Act 1 sets the scene, Act 2 injects a complication, Act 3 leads the characters through the complication and escalates, Act 4 presents a climax, Act 5 deals with the aftermath. Every player gets a single focal scene during each of the acts, and while it isn't their turn, they may assist from within the story with their characters, or may assist from outside the story by contributing with narration duties. I premise every game with a new group of players with a quick introduction to the system, a brief series of expectations from the players (ie. "I'm not going to spoon feed you this game", "You are expected to help contribute to the developing story" and "Please screw over your team-mates, it's the pirate way"). Like previous convention sessions, a quarter were really enthusiastic about the potential for communal storytelling, a quarter roughly got the idea but were open, a quarter were a bit intimidated by the concept but were intrigued enough to give it a go and the final quarter just didn't get it at all ("What do you mean? How can we tell the story, didn't you write it?").

It was interesting to correlate these divisions with the players age and the amount of time they'd spent roleplaying. Those with more experience tended far more to the open minded and enthusiastic side, while those who were either young (still teenagers), or who didn't have much roleplaying experience tended more toward the intimidated and close minded side. I'm not going to say that this is the case across all parts of the roleplaying spectrum, because I only received 30 or so of the 120 players at the convention, a great many more didn't even attempt to play my game (being more content to be spoon fed a 4th Ed D&D Module from the RPGA). At least I can be glad that I didn't get any formal warnings from the convention organisers due to complaints from my players (unlike at least one of the GMs at the Con).

Once the players had been given a general briefing of the rules and expectations, they were allowed to choose a genre in which the take would be told. "1950's Pulp Science Fiction", "Victoriana Steampunk" or "Anime". The convention tended heavily toward Steampunk (5 sessions), with a session each of Pulp Sci Fi and Anime.

10 characters had been made available at the front of the room, each with a prop that gives some kind of clue to their personality. Depending on the genre chosen, 3 characters were removed because they just didn't fit that type of storyline. The 5 players were then able to choose a character from the seven props available. I haven't tested the option of having players write their own characters at a convention yet, because a 3 hour timeslot gets cut down to 2.5 hours once rules are explained, character sheets are examined and a page of background is read. I've included a page of background to give players a bit more meat to utilize if they try to really get into character.

Only three players asked if they could choose new characters after they had a chance to look at the sheets. Two from one session (which will hereafter be referred to as SESSION X), and a single player from another session. Not surprisingly, all of the players who wanted new sheets were also players who fit into the last quarter above (just not getting it at all).

As the players read through their character histories, I wrote a series of genre conventions on a whiteboard at the front of the class-room. 
1950's Pulp Sci Fi: Communists, Mutants, Nuclear Power, A Morality Lesson.
Victoriana Steampunk: Clockwork Contraptions, Steam Devices, Eccentric Genius, Strange Supernatural Forces.
Anime: Tentacles, Large Ineffectual Explosions, Talking Animals, Young kid who knows more than the Adults around them.

While players are acting as narrators, they have a currency referred to as pieces of Eight, which may be used to introduce anything they like into the storyline (the more unrealistic it is, or the more dramatic it is, the more the introduction will cost). Players would be able to introduce elements incorporating the genre conventions for reduced cost.

The Game
The game begins with the crew pulling into New Orleans on some unspecified 4th of July in the early 22nd Century, the crew know that this is a party town and they are looking forward to spending some of their recently acquired booty on a night when they know there will be plenty of entertainment.

Dramatic event number 1 initiates the game, introduces the players to the concept that their actions have ramifications, and adds some dramatic tension from the outset.

It is described as an ectoplasmic tsunami sweeping across the landscape. Devastation follows in it's wake, gradually being replaced by an alternate version of reality. Some players ask if they'd seen one before (and I say yes, but quickly go on to finishing the description). The American flags of New Orleans are replaced by Chinese Flags, the 4th of July fireworks are replaced by explosions, the French Quarter is now a Japanese ghetto.

Reality has just shifted, the regular mundane people who haven't yet stepped out of the timeline all shift according to the changes in the timestream, the layers have a chance of changing, or at least losing some of their grip on reality (and losing a hit point/coherency point in the process).

I draw cards and compare them to relevant traits on the character sheets, in every session, at least half of the players lost a point and this certainly made the drama of the situation felt.

Some players asked if they could research what had happened, or if they had any knowledge of this type of thing. Here the game went into turn mode, with players being dealt cards to determine their scene order within the first act.

SESSION X had a player who used to be one of my regulars at conventions, along with two young teenagers (about 14 or so), a veteran D&D player and a fifth player who wasn't too active. One of the teenagers decided that he would time travel back and be the one who caused this change to history...kudos for thinking about the logistics of time-travel, but he just didn't get the concept that this change in the timeline was wrong and he'd wipe out everyone else in the process of fulfilling this self-made objective. This caused a decent amount of tension throughout the game as this player had decided to make it his characters drive for the entire session.

Other groups tended to take the lead of players who immediately got the concept of shared narrative. One player would try to do some research during their turn as the focal character, while another spent their pieces of eight to ensure their ship had a good alternate time-line historical database which could be used to uncover the truth. Nothing had been established about this concept one way or the other, and it was feasible for a time-traveling ship to possess this type of equipment, so it only cost a single point to introduce.

It was revealed from this point that the critical change in the timeline had occurred in April 1865. Abraham Lincoln had not been shot, he lasted 4 terms of office and the US became a larger military powerhouse far more quickly than it would have otherwise. The US prevent the British opium plots in China, the Chinese Imperial Bureaucracy does not fall, at this point other players often decide to add something to the historical twist to bring the effects seen into reality. They don't need to spend points for this as it doesn't really affect the storyline.

The players are told flat out that if they want to restore reality to a version closer to what they know, then they'll need to ensure Lincoln gets Shot, and if they really want reality to adjust correctly, they'll need to make it look like one of the historically established conspiracy theories. With further research I provide them with a couple of the more well known conspiracy theories.

Act 2 begins with the players on their way to Ford's Theatre, Washington DC, 1865. Some groups choose to go back a day or two before hand, some begin elaborate plans that need to be initiated months before. At least one group decides that they need to make multiple time jumps around the temporal location to ensure their complicated plots work.

After some arguments and killing half of the ships lesser crew, SESSION X decides that they don't want the US to be established in the first place since this is where the trouble started. They decide that the best way to do this is by sinking the Mayflower on it's way across the Atlantic. I've always said that the play of this game is in the hands of the players more than the GM. So I ran with it, hoping that more temporal waves would sweep across the landscape and gradually bring the crew (and the players) to their senses. (Such waves occur whenever I draw a joker from the deck, where Red joker tend to produce beneficial changes, and Black jokers produce detrimental changes, the deck is only shuffled once a joker is drawn...Murphy's law kicked in and this group kept getting Red jokers).

I'm torn between two options now: I'm trying to think of ways to hinder this sort of thing from happening in the future, but since the rest of the games went fairly well, I don't want to hinder the freeform path and swashbuckling freedom that was enjoyed by the other sessions.

In the end we had numerous further twists to the timeline which induced absolute anarchy across time and space, most of which were resolved by careful wording of other players, or through further jumps in time and space allowing the crew to sabotage their own previously made future plans. It really helped having a huge whiteboard at the front of the room and drawing a three metre long timeline with steps, key points, divergent timestream paths and other notes on it. I realise that this makes the game hard to play at home, but I'd love to find a way to minimise the size requirement for this sort of thing. Maybe through lined-up index cards, or something similar.

SESSION X is still giving me worries though, and I'm wondering how well other GMs might be able to handle the system with non-dynamic groups.

V