Torchbearer: What Makes Us Mythic

[Shreyas Sampat]

Torchbearer's going through a new draft, and I find that I'm not happy with the focus of the rule-colour.  Specifically, the rules allow characters to be mighty without rooting them in the lifeblood of myth.  My thought here is that Embers and Sparks are the big offenders here.  Traits will, given time, reinforce their own images and turn them mythic-sized.  But the slipperiness of Spark and Ember allows someone to be quite unMythic with them.  So, what I was thinking was something inspired both by Hero Wars (what I've heard talk of it) and OtherKind.  The use of Sparks and Embers can be made mythically impressive by requiring certain things of their use, in the narration department.

There are three important character types in Torchbearer, each with different mythic 'attitude'.  

First there are Heroes, extraordinary human specimens who become great through their own achievements.  When a hero uses an Ember, he should note down how he used it, and the Myth rank of the action.  People talk about heroes, and the stories change with time.  The hero's stories spread, and they're talked about.  In any place less Mythic than the hero, he will be instantly recognized and acclaimed for one of his mythic acts, unless he acts to avoid it.  When the hero performs an act more mythic than any he has thus far recorded, the others are mostly forgotten, replaced by the new glory, but the finest are magnified to match the new one.
When a hero loses Myth, the same thing happens - most of his stories are forgotten, but a few are scaled down to fit.  Thus, you have the story of Wu T'i who shot down the sun, which gets pulled down to William Tell, who shot an apple off a boy's head, as an extreme example.

Leihesjun are demigods, those of the Golden Blood.  They are linked to a god, and their mystical actions are always emulations of a god, either emulating a specific action (Sparks) or riffing off a theme (Embers).  When a leihesju creates a Spark, he creates the myth that the Spark draws from.  When he draws on an Ember, he takes on aspects of the deity, or the god's manifestations in the environment respond to the presence of the master.
Drinking a Hero's blood, one can become a leihesju that draws on the Hero's power; Sparks can be taken from his stories and Embers from his Traits.  The same thing is true of bloodtheft from any of the mighty Mythic creatures.

Skinchangers are creatures of transformation and inner conflict of the most horrific kind.  Their mystical abilities are acts of autosacrifice, allowing the 'dominant', humane self be temporarily suborned by the beast inside.  When a skinchanger uses a Spark, he is doing something practiced and finely controlled.  This isn't too brain-wracking or dangerous, but it does more or less guarantee that violence is forthcoming.  The beast becomes hungry when its jailer teases it.
But when a skinchanger uses an Ember, he is specifically allowing the Beast to deal with the problem in its own way.  This is never pretty; the Beast thinks in ivory and red.  When he surrenders in this way, the skinchanger must fight the beast to regain control.  This can be accomplished in two different ways - the Beast will retreat in the face of a humiliating defeat or after hunting and being satiated.  The only thing that will satiate the beast is spiritual violence - destruction that hurts the heart as well as the body.  The beast will commit this violence upon itself, if it knows of no one else; it is the fact of pain that satisfies it, not its infliction.  During the Skinchanger War, everyone had heard a story of the man whose children started to disappear... the man whose teeth were white as the moon, who swam like a river, who sang like an avalanche, who finally turned into a jaguar and ate everyone he loved.
So skinchangers have the ability to turn Spark Traces into Ember Traces, which always destroy relationships or encourage violent behavior.

Edit:
So, my question is, is this needlessly complicating things, or is it valuable and useful?

[GreatWolf]

I will confess that I have forgotten what Embers and Sparks are, so a quick refresher for those of us who are a little out of touch would be helpful.

That being said, I think that your basic Hero mechanic is probably your best bet.  If you want to distinguish the other two character types, use variations on the basic Hero theme.  Of course, this doesn't really solve your problem.  I don't think that it will necessarily encourage or discourage mythic roleplaying from your players.  However, allowing the players to build the myth of the game world, and letting that have some sort of broader impact, is very cool, and it is the sort of thing that could be rewarding to the sort of person who would enjoy Torchbearer.

You know, like me.  ;-)

However, as it stands, I do not see an in-game or mechanical "carrot" for mythic roleplaying or a "stick" to discourage non-mythic roleplaying.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[Shreyas Sampat]

Refresher:

[*]An ordinary Trait is something the character can do without any mechanical effort.  Something like "Wudan Mountain Kungfu" could be a Trait.
[*]A Spark is something that the character can do, but it requires the expenditure of mythic force, Fuel.  A Spark on the same theme could be "The Buddha's Palm of Peace".
[*]An Ember is a category of things; by expending more and more mythic force, a character can get stronger effects out of it.  "Seven Dragons Style" could be an Ember; it looks like a Trait, but it creates inflatable and variable effects.[/list:u]I agree that the Hero mechanic is the best of the three.  I'd like to think that the carrotstick is the repetition of myth elements: If they're really mythic and cool, then it's enjoyable to hear them repeated every now and then, but it seems that this creates the wrong kind of stick with the wrong kind of play - rather than trying to be cooler, people who aren't enjoying the spotlight are likely to shy away from it.

[Jonathan Walton]

Hey Shreyas,

Good to hear that work on Torchbearer is continuing.  There are a couple of things here that I think are definitely worth encouraging.

1) Making Myth something that is explicitly specific to place.  Having certain "high mythic" areas is delicious.  If I ever get around to running an Exalted game, I'm definitely using this.  It really gets to the animist roots of Torchbearer, where the land and objects are just as much characters as the PCs are.  Likewise the having the Myth the characters bring with them interact with the Myth of the land is wonderful.

2) Setting up a duality between Sparks and the more powerful Embers, where Sparks represent the Inner Myth, the Myth of Self, and Embers represent the Outer Myth, the Myth of the Other.  Think of it like internal and external forms of martial arts.  In using Sparks, you are building your own Myth from your own individual actions.  However, in using Embers, you are drawing on the higher power that you draw strength from (the Gods for the God-Blooded, the Beast for Skinchangers, Places/Objects/Situations for Heroes).  This would mean, in order to set up this dialectic, that you'd have to require Hero Embers to draw upon something higher than themselves, which is why I suggested that Heroes draw upon the Myth of the Land, the Myth of some great artifact or weapon, or simply the Myth they are currently involved in (like the Trojan War, for instance, when everyone was larger-than-life for the duration of the conflict).  Just a suggestion.

More thoughts later.

[Jonathan Walton]

Hey again,

I don't like replying to myself, but I had a revelation in the middle of my Qur'an class today.  The teacher was talking about her research into the unique forms of Indonesian piety (a topic for another time), when something struck me about what Torchbearer means by "mythic."

It seems to me that the "mythic" style of Torchbearer has two main components.

1) Characters able to do zonked-out, impossible stuff.

2) The aestheticization of every action and component of the game world.

All the mechanics do a great job of supporting #1 and adding some color, but they don't really require players to do #2.  The text and color of the game encourage the kind of aesthetic you want, but they don't make players do it.  I think what you're really looking for has nothing to do with Sparks and Embers, but about forcing the aestheticization that you want to occur.

[Shreyas Sampat]

As usual, I reply in reverse.

Characters are able to do zonked-out, impossible stuff.  Good enough.

Every thing and action is aestheticised.  Strangely, I had this aestheticization thing in the back of my head, but I never made the connection of actually telling the players.  I feel a little stupid.
But just a little.  The problem, as you said, is how one gets this across.  I've been thinking about flowers lately; Nobilis is poisoning my mind.  So, here's a thought, very metagame and very weird:

Every player has a unique flower.  When someone does something particularly beautiful, you can tell the current holder of the flower to give it to this other person.  When a flower gets taken from you, you get a drop of Fuel.  If you ever hold all the flowers, you must return them to their owners and take a drop of Fuel for each flower you gave away.  There's a little thinking behind this: flowers because they're a physical statement of beauty, and "consolation" Fuel because it encourages rapid flower exchange, and turns one reward into two.  It's sort of the slippery Torchbearer way of Exalted's Stunt dice...
In the perfect world, these flowers would be fresh, and there would be a vase full of spares ready, in case they start taking a beating.  Instead of flowers, players could use anything similarly evocative and beautiful: daggers, flags, signet rings, sealed letters.  I'd be tempted to require that the "insignia" all be of a kind, though; I have this hunch that it would lose effect if the insignia were like Monopoly pieces.

Mythic places:  This is implicit in the game (and even sneaks into an early discussion on mythic repercussions), but I think you have a good thought in making it explicit.  As usual, I expected too much of my readers.

Inner/Outer Myth: In light of your later comments, I can see that this can be pushed into the lowlight, but I think it still deserves some thinking about.  I particularly like the idea of tying Heroes to something larger - the Land, the People, the Treasure...