[Elfs] Serpent cultists and repressed priestesses

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I've been wanting to play Elfs for lots and lots of people at once for a long time. This time, we had six, and it works great! What a rockin' game. The players were the guys at the campus role-playing club, most of whom knew D&D pretty well in one form or another. Their eyes lit up when I presented the illustrations and the introductory text.

The characters included the Great Poo-bah (paranoid), Grand Master Fluffy Pink Cloud (fluff-brained), Butterfingers the Slick Blade (plain mean), Kip McDuffy (jittery), Dirk Shiny Blade (poser-cool), and Dragonbreath (wise-ass). Interestingly, all of them were Oral Stage except for Dirk (Genital) and Dragonbreath (Anal).

I decided to use one of my favorite old-school modules from back in high school: the village of Orlane, which is being taken over, Innsmouth-like, by a set of nasty serpent-cultists. Not only is it a pretty good open-ended module (with the exception of the stupid NPC wizard who shows up, tells the player-characters what to do, and provides a little backup), but it has Tim Truman art! Cool. I've used it for Elfs before and have a pretty good handle on its details. As I say, it's pretty much Innsmouth. Characters are expected to deal with all sorts of cultists and spooky stuff, fighting snake-creatures, and eventually figure out that the local temple is totally corrupted by a spirit naga. Why the spirit-naga isn't in the temple, but rather in a "dungeon" set in the nearby swamp, is beyond me, but that's all right.

In Elfs, the "good" townspeople are all secretive and scared, which of course means they blurt everything out at the slightest provocation. They beg for help and then warn the characters away from everywhere. The "bad" townspeople are scary-normal-cheerful, and absolutely obviously "turned," with forked tongues and lizard-like head movements and patches of scales. The hilarious part about that is that the elfs, typically, don't react to these features as being anything special. The evil priestess at the temple is utterly repressed-passionate, and the evil priest is obsessed with her. It's even more fun because I decided they are siblings.

I put some thought into the rules revisions for the upcoming book version of Elfs, which you can read about in Elfs revisions. Humbly, I think they are spot-on, especially the revised stages and associated rules for tattling. Not only did people enjoy the tattling, but also enjoyed defending the tattlee - and it took very little time in actual game-play. Furthermore, the over-the-top porn and anal-ism that some groups seem to descend into, when playing this game, didn't show up for a second. For one thing, you don't have to keep Stage in mind for every freakin' roll (like you used to), and for another, Stage-based behaviors supply no bonuses. Tattling does, but not Stage.

This didn't happen in this game, but one player brought the issue that he couldn't see how to resolve player-character on player-character conflict, especially deadly conflict. I think what threw him is that no rolls are opposed in Elfs. As it happens, such conflict is indeed possible in the rules, but based on our discussion, I decided to clarify it in the revision. We can discuss this in the Adept Press column, if anyone's interested.

What happened? Oh golly, with six characters to tell you about, and with players who've been enjoying a wide assortment of high-player-power games lately, that's overwhelming. We had drunken swilling, banjo dances, crocodile fights, a kitchen fight (always fun), much running back and forth, monks with snake-tattoos on their chests, mis-cast magic on several occasions, and surprisingly enough, by the end of the session, everyone was trooping off to fight the naga, although for wildly differing reasons.

Magical items were of course a central issue. Two elfs found Hosers: one had his clothes shrunk and ran off from the kitchen fight all naked, and another got shortened by a foot. On the plus side, one found the Gatling Crossbow and another, the Long & Shiny Blade of Penetration. And finally, the other two characters found perfectly boring normal versions of what they wanted.

I was especially happy with the character who refreshed himself with a nice mug of (sacred) beer, then was confronted by the enraged priest, who decided to turn the beer into the Evil Potion after all (his original plan) regardless of whether it's in an elf's guts or not. The elf promptly horked up the beer/Evil Potion, which did awful damage to the priest, and then, while trying to escape the room, accidentally shot him multiple times, and fatally, with the Gatling Crossbow. Self-important NPCs are almost guaranteed a horrible, humiliating, oh-my-God fatality in Elfs.

One player demonstrated his excellent understanding of Dumb Luck with the one-two combo. His first action, upon being confronted with the evil (and obviously highly-repressed) priestess and her assassin-monks, was for the elf to try to escape, but inadvertently to seduce her. His second, once she had thrown open her severe robes to reveal the negligee (which she secretly wears all the time, of course) and sworn her love for him, was for the elf to try to get all snoggly with her but inadvertently to slice off a monk's head with his sword (which of course he was holding but not thinking about). Since, predictably, the elf failed both actions but he (the player) succeeded in both, the results were hysterical.

Another demonstrated that Low Cunning was a true killer when properly applied, as small meannesses tended to add up and end up in his favor. And even when they didn't, they added all sorts of material for later scenes. Casually swiping another elf's arrows in the first scene proved to be a major disaster for that character after he found the Gatling Crossbow, and was left gaping in terror when he discovered he was out of bolts. This character (the Low-Cunning-specialized one) was extremely nasty in combat and at one point impaled a troglodyte/lizard thing's head through its mouth with an iron spike, which he'd concealed in a stein of beer.

Incidentally, the players noted that while arrows are present on the equipment list, crossbow bolts are not even though there is a crossbow listed. They were pleased to discover that elfs bought arrows and laughed about how stupid the humans are, because you get two bolts for every arrow! Just break'em in half!

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Responding to myself ...

Would anyone like to ask me questions about Elfs, as a role-playing game?

I promise not to let any of them touch you.

Best,
Ron

[Anthony I]

Ron,

Could you go into a bit more detail about the characters- I'm guessing by the small descriptor after each name that this is a type of character class?

Could you also go into some detail about what the Stages are?

Thanks

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Anthony,

The easiest thing is to outline Elfs character creation for you.

1. You distribute some numbers to these three scores: Spunk, Low Cunning, and Dumb Luck. Spunk is the foundation value for doing anything, and the other two act as modifiers (adding) to it in specific sorts of actions.

2. The adjective is merely one, single adjective. "My elf is flaky," that sort of thing. No further back-story or depth is required, or indeed, desirable. A list is provided but it's only for inspiration.

3. Characters are then assigned a Stage, with the player choosing among Anal, Oral, or Genital. This mechanic is (now) only concerned with the option of "tattling," in which a player may get a temporary bonus by pointing out the GM that another player has failed to have his or her elf accord with the assigned stage. (The original mechanic has turned out to be problematic.)

"Stage" is, I hope clearly, a spoof on alignment and how it's often utilized in certain applications of AD&D.

4. You then roll some money and buy some stuff, and your elf is all set to go.

5. Oh yeah! You also name and describe the magical item you'd really like your elf to acquire.

About elfs themselves, think of them as short, rude, neurotic, greedy, and afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder. They're also a little bit cute in a "don't mind if he gets eaten" sort of way.

Best,
Ron

[Valamir]

Well, knowing that Elfs doesn't get played as often as it could, perhaps you could outline the old Stage system and what was problematic in play, and contrast that with the new Stage system and your experience with it above?

I also would enjoy seeing a similiar contrast between the old Dumb Luck and new Dumb Luck methods.  

Being one of those who never actually played Elfs and was rather confused by the whole Dumb Luck thing at the time.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

All right! Cool.

STAGE
The older system meant that you had to monitor every roll in Elfs for whether Stage came into play. Rolls in Elfs range from 0 to 3 successes, always. Stage came into play in a fairly gross slapstick way on 0 successes (e.g. an Anal elf gets blown off his feet by a mighty fart); and in the case of Genital elfs, permitted some bonuses from characters' behavior. The Stage rules were pretty much three separate little sub-rules that had to be monitored all the time as dice hit the table. That was a real pain during play.

The strange thing, though, was that people really focused on what I thought was a very minor bonus, specifically that Genital elfs gain a +1 Spunk for a day after getting laid. I still don't know why people focused so highly on that, when hugely more bonuses were available by other means, but weird things would happen like soft-core rape scenes, and then people complained about the game rules. To this day, there are people out there who think Elfs contains rules "for" rape.

The newer rules are as I've described: just tattling. In other words, there's absolutely no bonus or penalty for acting in or out of Stage, for the character. There's only a single minor bonus for tattling on someone who doesn't. Arguably, one could be something of an altruist and play an Elf who never acts in-Stage, providing a steady supply of bonuses to one's fellow players.

DUMB LUCK
These rules aren't changed much - what's changed are the basic resolution mechanics. In the original, a given task was rated at how many successes you needed to do it. Now, a single success is always good enough, and extra successes just mean you do it with flair.

That makes Dumb Luck way, way easier to employ, because you don't have to factor "difficulty" into the process. No one had any learning-curve delay in using it in the recent session, unlike past play, in which people always took a few scenes or a couple of sessions to get it.

For everyone's edification, Dumb Luck in Elfs works like this: the player announces what the elf is trying to do, and also announces another (parallel) outcome that has nothing to do with the elf's intentions. You roll against [Spunk + Dumb Luck]. If you get 0 successes, neither outcome occurs. If you get 1 or 2, the player's outcome does occur but the elf's doesn't. If you get 3, then both the player's outcome and the elf's intent occur.

Notice that the elf never succeeds at the expense of the player's outcome; this is intentional on my part.

Best,
Ron

P.S. Oh yeah! I forgot. Another step in character creation is deciding whether your elf is a Magic-slingin' Elf or not. You don't have to decide right away; some people like to wait a session or two. Being a Magic-slingin' Elf does not limit or diminish any other aspects of the character, but magic does rely heavily on Dumb Luck and hence on the player's facility with that mechanic.