[Fudge: Collectors] The first playtest

[Alan McVey]

The Fudge setting, Collectors: The Burning House, has been out for a while now, but I thought it was time for a reminder of just how good it can be.  I took part in the original playtest for it, consisting of the author (Tom MacKay), myself, and my wife.

A little bit of a backstory: the original version of what was to become the player's guide for the Collectors was initially much more casually written, but also much more humourously.  For example:

You start with 40 levels to allocate to skills; each level raises a skill up one notch from its default.  So you could spend 3 points on "unleash hellfire" (a Very Hard skill, don't you know) to gain a ranking of fair.  (Imagine that.  Hello there, my name is Zurech.  I am 'fair' at unleashing hellfire.  Care for a tequila?)

or

A sophisticated electronic security system needing a superb or better result on Making Locked Locks Unlocked . . . maybe I should say "pick locks" or something.

I won't even mention the line about Superman being a demon.

(If you ever get the chance to chat with the author, do so.  He's a delight.)  The game itself is less concerned with the plot than it is with the relationship that the characters develop among themselves.  The Burning House is designed for two characters with some sort of spiritual/psychological connection between them, and the setting as it's written up gives plenty of options for developing that.  With more than two characters, it's more difficult, but not impossible.  On the mailing list for the game, players have described running the scenario for up to six players.  There is also room for expanding upon demonic powers, although there are no particular guidelines offered for potential GMs -- that part could be tricky.

As for the setting: the player's guide gives an excellent background that could be used for extended campaigns, but the concept works best for one-shot games or a series of largely-unconnected scenarios.  Again, the mailing list has proposed options (collecting demons taking part in events over a long period of time, or encountering new situations with different twists), but I would most strongly recommend this for a one-shot.  Read through the background, though, and see if it's useful to you for any modern supernatural settings.

The plot: there are a few points in the game in which the plot can take some major twists, but the published version of it accounts for most options.  In the original, things were largely improvised, and the GM of the scenario as it is printed will still have to think on her feet, but there are plenty of helpful suggestions for ways to go.

Finally, on the academic side: the players in the original game were three PhD students in religious studies, and the setting reflects that fact.  Freud and Lacan figure heavily in the "unconscious" of the game, and paying attention to their ideas will be rewarded.  It's a game that rewards cooperation between players when creating characters, and rewards interesting character ideas even more.

-Alan

[ethan_greer]

Hi Alan,
The problem here is that your post is more of an advert than an account of actual play. Since you're acquainted with the author, I'm assuming that you want people to get interested in and purchase Collectors.  Which is perfectly fine. Plugging things is to a degree an aspect of communication at the Forge. (After all, check out my sig!) However, threads that provide little valuable content other than the plugging are frowned upon, and that brings us to the point:

Please tell us about your playtest experience. You don't need to give away all the stuff about the work, but I for one am interested by the product and want to know more about your experiences.  Some sample question you might answer:

What was the coolest darn thing that happened in your playtest?
What were the characters like?
How does the game reward interesting characters and cooperation during character creation? Give an example from your playtest, if possible.

Thanks!

[Alan McVey]

Thanks, Ethan.  This is what I get for posting late at night, when intentions and results start to drift in different directions.  Let's see if I can manage a bit more clarity this morning.

The three questions you asked -- about the coolest part of the playtest, the characters, and the reward for cooperation -- are all linked, or were, in my experience.  It starts with the basic premise: you are a soul-collecting demon with a constructed human identity, complete with memories.  You do your collection work because it's a way to stay out of Hell, a Hell that you can't remember except in fragments, and that you don't want to remember.  The way I took it is that the setting is wrapped up in questions of identity: which is more real, your constructed memories or your buried ones?  That led to my half of the pair of characters in the game.

I opted for my demon's cover identity to be that of a frustrated Midwestern film-maker, consigned to making commercials rather than the art films that he would prefer, but also suffering from a traditional demonic problem: a complete lack of creativity.  All of his ideas were clichés and all of his actions were based on pre-scripted plans that he wrote himself.  If something disrupted those plans, he was incapable of responding until he had the time to rewrite the script.  (This, and the fact that he would forget anything that he didn't write down, were represented by a pair of flaws.  The rest of his abilities, as I recall, were quite ordinary, and mostly based around looking impressive rather than actually being able to do anything useful.  Again, it was a question of identity, or at least the simulation of identity.)

His partner, played by my wife, took a different approach to the same issue.  Her cover was as his agent, who could only tell lies or make vague, meaningless comments.  She was the social half of the team, with a wide range of contacts and skills at insinuating herself into any conversation with ease.  As my wife played her, the agent believed (or wanted to believe) her own lies, and would get so wrapped up in them that they became a comfortable substitute for reality.

One of the features of the game was the idea that Collectors are paired up because of some shared past in Hell (and before they were damned).  The details of that repressed past would come out in flashes or dreams, and would be tailored for each particular pair of characters.  This is where the reward for the players comes in: by building our characters around a common theme, we gave Tom a way to make these repressed memories more meaningful from a stylistic point of view, re-emphasizing the theme while adding more depth to the characters themselves.  (In our case, the two were formerly a master and slave, with the master in love with a woman but unable to express himself properly and the slave in love with the master.  The slave was sent to win over the woman, she fell in love with him, and the master killed the slave and himself when he found out.  In this incarnation, the master was the film-maker, and the slave, his agent.)

It's only as I write this that I notice some details of the plot that I'd missed before.  There are cross-dressing NPCs, switched souls, a pair of angels who accidentally end up in each other's bodies on Earth, and maybe other, similar, things.  In each case, these details raise the question of who a person "really" is, which is one of the questions that Collectors have to deal with in regard to themselves.  In fact, without giving away too much of the plot, I'd say that answering that question is central to the experience of the game.

If I were to give advice to anyone else planning on playing The Burning House, it would be to invest as much time and thought into character creation as possible.  If the game is as bound up in issues of identity as it seems to me, then establishing that identity is the first step to making the rest of the game rewarding both for players and the one running it.

-Alan