Orccon 2003, Universalis

[marknau]

At the three-day game-a-thon that is OrcCon, I had the good fortune of being able to try out three, count 'em, three RPG systems that I had never played before. This post will cover the Universalis game that my group played during the wee hours of the final day.

The players were Mark, Tiffany, Chuck, Wayne, and Joe. I immediately asked for someone who would take on the notekeeping, knowing that Tiffany would step up. She's my younger sister, and all through my CRPG days she would sit beside and take notes and draw maps (back in the days before automapping, you young curs!) Anyhow, having a happy and efficient notetaker is a major boon when playing this game, I must note.

I explained the very basics and distributed some of my newly-purchased polished-rock tokens. "Everyone get it?" I ask. "I say we do a Gamma-World type setting," says Wayne as he slides a token toward the pile. "Hold on," says Tiff, and begins negotiations. Guess they get it.

We settle on a Fantasy setting, serious tone, rare and subtle magic. "No killing the big bad guy at the end," says Tiffany. We spend quite a bit of time establishing properties of the world. Non-human races may not come from D&D/Tolkein. There is a prophecy of a true ruler who will lead the downtrodden to liberation. We work out some details of an elitist rule political system.

It was interesting to see the interplay between those whose natural inclination was to work on the properties of the game world and the races, and those who preferred to jump into scenes and let it develop organically. In practice, we split the middle, which made everyone happy. We had a good enough skeleton to riff off of, but not too constraining. We got through 5 separate scenes in a 2-and-a-half-hour session, which seemed like a good pace.

Scene 1:
Lars, a young human man, is working in a pig sty. He wrestles with a large pig, falls in the mud. His Farren (feline race) mistress berates him for being an oaf, and tells him to get inside and clean up. This was by far the shortest scene in terms of content, but took up a lot of real time as we were interspersing a lot of discussion, explanation of mechanics, and game-world definition throughout.

Scene 2:
Inside of Krista's(the Farren from scene 1) home, some hours later. The dining room, exquisitely decorated in pseudo-oriental style. The guests are abuzz about the all-but-decided confirmation of Gar to the Regency Council. An elderly Farren seated next to Gar turns to him and exchanges some congratulatory words (via Dialogue). Suddenly, the elderly one(now named Lord Sachen) leaps from his seat and lunges at one of the human servants. This was our first Conflict. Tiffany was paying coins to have this happen, even though I had introduced Lord Sachen, so I rewound her a little bit to use the Conflict mechanism instead. She created a human servant with a knife who was going to attack Gar. Others added "skilled assassin" and "combat training" to his traits. I hadn't mentioned how conflicts worked until this came up, and everyone immediately got into it. Lots of smiles all around. Someone pointed out that "elderly" should give me a die because the attack would come as a surprise. Everyone nodded and were obviously relishing in how cool it all was.
In the event, Lord Sachen knocked the knife away, but not until the assassin had cut across Gar's shoulder. We segued into another Conflict between Lars and the assassin, in which Lars dumped hot soup over the assailant and then brained him with the serving tray, knocking him cold.
Krista starts yelling at Lars for ruining her dinner party, but Lord Sachen straightens her out and defends the boy. She now harbors a grudge against Lars for making her look bad in front of her guests. As the party starts to return to normal, we notice that Gar is staring off blankly into the distance, then slumps forward into his meal.

Scene 3:
An underground catacombs, some months earlier. We see a lizardman, dressed in arabic thobe and ghutra, kneeling before a stone altar. On the altar is an ancient book cramped with alien writing. As he stands up, two elder lizardmen in hooded robes approach him. This was our second Dialogue, with 3 different people taking part. The conversation established that the kneeling lizardman (now named Jezerin) is undertaking a mysterious task of great importance, and will not return until he has succeeded. He is given a cape and sword of great importance to the Order, and instructions to take himself to Krista/Gar's province, where the elders have seen there will be a great nexus of events. Jezerin confidently strides out toward his task.

Scene 4:
The local council hall at Gar's province, shortly after scene 2. Lord Sachen (now established as Gar's father) and other important locals wait solemnly for word on Gar's condition. A Farren doctor comes in and (via Dialogue) confirms it was poison, and that Gar will stay in a dark sleep until it is neutralized. He has maybe several days to live. The doctor leaves. An bipedal owl, named Oren, enters. The owls are mystics. Oren tells Lord Sachen that he knows a way to cure Gar, but that a trip of several days will be necessary. The journey will be dangerous.
Jezerin immediately volunteers to lead the group, and as he is a legendary swordsman, Lord Sachen is happy to accept. Jezerin asks that Lars accompany him, and as Lord Sachen is pondering this odd request, Oren pipes in and says that he Sees Lars being important to the mission.
Krista balks at this. Lars is her indentured servant, and is an incompetant bumbler. She doesn't want his screwing things up. Jezerin offers to pay her twice the cost of Lars's contract. As she considers how to refuse this offer, Lord Sachen turns the sale into a personal favor. She cannot refuse.
The meat of this scene was done via Dialogue, with lots of OOC conversation about maintaining continuity and debates about the direction and nature of the upcoming quest. I was again Lord Sachen, and was finding that I enjoyed being able to introduce or "buy" the same character across several scenes.

Scene 5:
A garrison/armory building, soon after the last scene. Jezerin is organizing a group of local guards to accompany him on his quest. He mounts an 8-legged beast, pulls Lars up behind him, and the party sets off. Pigeons are sent forward to forewarn the outposts to have fresh mounts available.
We see them madly racing across hills and through forest. They quickly switch mounts a few times along the way, eating up the miles. During a one such late-night change-over, the captain of the guard is approached and told that the next outpost will have difficulty providing new rides because of local rioting. An alternate location is specified.
As they approach the place, they are ambushed by Farren bandits. If it were not for Jezerin's superior abilities, the group would surely have been over-run. As it was, the lizardman saw them through despite being unhorsed early on. Lars, now alone on the mount and barely in control, even unseated one of the bandits for Jezerin to run through. Many on both sides are slain or gravely injured.
After the last bandit is struck down, Jezerin takes note of the fact that the "bandits" were unusually well-equipped and well-trained. Someone with plenty of coin funded these troops. Why did they attack this group? Who is behind them? Joe's narration of the Conflict left us with some nice cliffhanger-type material.

Which is where we ended due to the late hour. The attempted scope of this first attempt was clearly larger than I would have thought was prudent, but we all enjoyed the session immensely. The session notes will be saved in the event that we decide to continue the story at the next convention on Memorial day weekend (some of us are "convention friends"). Everyone enjoyed the session, and time passed much faster than we aware of.

I thought I would have a bit of a hard time selling my group on giving Universalis a try, but they were quite willing. I got a very strong feel that we were mostly about Exploration of Setting, with some Exploration of Character, which is not surprising given the very Sim nature of the group's usual fare. Everyone accepted a uniform "spirit of the game", with no attempt to "exploit" the game mechanics in any way. It seems like everyone had only a hazy idea of what should ultimately happen in the story, and was mostly riffing off of each other.

Lovely session, can't wait to try it again.

[Bob McNamee]

I just love reading how people play this game!
Makes you want to say "So, then what happened?"

[Bob McNamee]

Was there any struggling for Control of any of the Characters?

[marknau]

Was there any struggling for Control of any of the Characters?

No Character struggles at all, no. Every scene but the first we had a Dialogue, and every time someone bought a character for a single coin in order to facilitate dialogue. In the book-and-altar scene, for example, I had created all the characters in setting the scene, then passed. The two elders were taken over by others for 1 coin each, and then we went into dialogue. In every case, the others were happy to see what transpired. Oh, there was one case where someone ran out of steam and assented to let another player assume control for a coin.

There were a LOT of negotiations, and hardly any challenges. Two challenges happened up front, over the theme and tone issues. After that, there was only one other, regarding a Fact about Jezerin's Order. The issue was whether it was a secret Order or not (yes). Everything else, even some contentious issues, were handled through negotiation.

Makes you want to say "So, then what happened?"

Yes, even for those of us who played it! In our post-play discussion, it was pointed out that our group likes the aspect of traditional RPG where someone creates a world and the others explore it. A big plus for us in Universalis is that we can do the same thing, except you are exploring this thing that exists in an as-yet hazy state in everyone's mind.

[J B Bell]

Yeah, yeah, sure sure, but WHAT ABOUT THE ZOMBIES?

:)))

[Valamir]

Wow great post.  I'll be sure to put this up on the site next time I update.
I must say that Universalis is one of the few games that I actually enjoy hearing breathless accounts of "and then what happened".

Partially I'm sure that comes from it being my game ;-) but I also think that its one of the few games where such accounts are educational from a "learning the possibilities" perspective.  I never get tired of hearing how different groups used different features or latched on to different ideas, many times I learn things about the game *I* didn't even know.

[Mike Holmes]

I really like that you picked "serious" as a tenet, and stuck to it, apparently. Lot's of late night Con sessions (where Universalis gets a lot of play; makes sense as people often want to play but have nothing prepped) forget to add this tenet, and things get goofy fast.

Not that there's anyting wrong with goofy, Seth.

Mike