[Nine Worlds] Slow and careful rules and examples

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

All right, point one is that we finally played the game correctly yesterday. Conflicts went faster, narrations went smoothly, points got transferred where they belonged, and so on. The only really major fallout from our one serious rules-mismanagement was that Julie's character should really have a bunch of Valor that she hasn't got, and that's hampering her effectiveness relative to the other characters, at present. It's especially not fair because she and another player had their characters undergo a battle of wits in the last session, and Julie's inability to bid for Trump basically lost her the contest.

Killing Proteus
Eero, I think you might be misreading Proteus in my posts as "Prometheus." The latter is indeed a major rulebook figure in the setting, and rather beyond the scope of the player-characters, I think. Proteus is a character that was introduced by Tod through his character's initial Muses, based on our intellectual jam-session about Greek myth prior to play; his Wikipedia entry provides some basics. The thing that struck us as a group was that this character is kind of mixed up, mythologically, with another fellow named Nereus.

It would be boring to outline how the details of these characters, Tod's muses, and some muses of other player-characters got all tangled up during play itself, but one detail concerns a fake prophecy made by Dr. Tiresias, a real prophecy made by Nereus, and the co-opting of Nereus' prophecy, then Dr. Tiresias' identity, by Proteus. Damn shapeshifters ... tricky buggers ... Oh, and also how an NPC, Stacey, gets her Ph.D. by unravelling the Proteus/Nereus controversy. You get the idea; it was a messy storyline with lots of reversals for everyone along the way.

Part of the Nine Worlds setting includes the relatively recent death of Poseidon, which is all wrapped up with the metaphysical nature of the Aethersea, with a group called the Lost Armada, and inevitably the Atlanteans. Tod is a very naval-history Hornblower sort of player, as well as a god-killer from way back (geez, Amber, Hero Wars, Sorcerer & Sword; he just loves killing gods).

The outcome over our session is that Proteus betrayed Poseidon during the war with the Titans, that Nereus is a different (and nicer) godling altogether, and although his identity is tangled up with another similar figure, that figure is Glaucus , not Proteus. Tod decides that Proteus needs killing, and that Nereus/Glaucus can be elevated into a new sea-god - and with any luck, the Lost Armada can actually convince the Atlanteans to abandon their allegiance to the Titans. Very much a "brothers of the sea, tho' we be on different sides" kind of thing.

Tod's character, Gelons, clashed with Proteus in many different circumstances, including an attack of sea-monsters, a trap which imprisoned Nereus, and a whole slew of academic intrigue back on Sol (this is where Stacey almost got turned into a newt!). Gelons wasn't able to kill Proteus in their face-to-face confrontation, but much to Tod's satisfaction, he was able to knock down Proteus' horrific Metamorphosis 7 down to 2, then lock it there with a really nasty lock. He narrated that it resulted in an indelible "P" in Proteus' forehead, which is really funny because the academics were still all debating about which of these two guys was Proteus and which was Nereus, and whether they were the same guy, etc. Tod has a characteristic way of decisively resolving things in-game, when he gets the chance.

Anyway, the lethal showdown hit in the next session (one session before the last one), in which Tod was using three or four Muses at once in his conflicts involving this stuff, all of which were at near-capacity, so he's making 25 and 30 card draws and praying he gets the high Fate or that no one extends the conflicts. It is way too wacky to try to describe who-all was opposing whom about what during this conflict. Suffice to say that Proteus was dealing with Gelons, who wanted to kill him, and Manto, who wanted to squeeze some information out of him. Also, the players had done a very fine job of undercutting (and hence resolving) Proteus' Muses, leaving the character with a low basic draw.

You see, Tod had a great Chaos hand on the first exchange and really wanted to kill Proteus with them, so he knocked Proteus' Power down to zero. If the round ended there, then Proteus would be dead - but Maura had the high Fate with Metamorphosis, and utilized it to restore one point of Power, then narrated to get her information. Note that she didn't have to do this, in that Proteus wouldn't be dead until the round ended, but I think we were seeing some interesting inter-player negotiation - Maura was basically letting Tod know that if she didn't get what she wanted out of this conflict, then Proteus might live through it. She extended the conflict into another round, and indeed, both characters got what they needed through some generous narrations (favoring one another's goals) and this time Proteus' Power was dropped to zero, and hence he was killed.

Conflict proposal and NPC introduction
Eero, you mentioned some important stuff about how a GM is constrained from simply tossing in tons of NPCs as speed-bumps as an ongoing device of play.

A few sessions ago, the conflict at hand concerned a confrontation between Manto (Maura's character) and Jason (the descendant, not the original). We talked a bit about the initial features of the scene, then I basically busted a surprise by having Medea show up, with dragons, with Jason as her prisoner.

As a related point, in one of our conflicts, Dr. Tiresias was attempting to flee the University of Delphi (the plague, you know ...) as various conflicts erupted there in the halls of academe. Maura announced that her goal was to capture him. She succeeded, but that's not the point - the point is that Manto was last seen leaving a situation back on Terra, and so in plausible-causal terms, she just showed up in time to be on hand for the current conflict, and to nab Tiresias. None of which involved how long it took her aethership trip to get from Terra to Sol, and none of which involved any particular conflict resolution to see whether she "made it in time," or anything like that.

Here's how I manage these things, throughout all play of Nine Worlds, to keep myself from having a free, ongoing hand merely to throw conflicts and endless NPCs at the players in an unconstrained (and frankly, story-controlling and exhausting) way. I go by the character's Muses, at all times. In the first case, one of Manto's Muses was written, by her, as "Get my fucking Fleece back, you shyster. Medea is already on my ass." For my money, I now have carte blanche, signed by Maura herself, to bring Medea into play as enthusiastically and in as well-timed a manner as possible.

Same goes for the Tiresias thing - since one of Manto's Muses was also, "Find Dr. Tiresias, who disappeared when he researched this mysterious plague," it seems perfectly reasonable to me that Maura has a hell of a lot of Director Stance privilege to frame herself right into scenes that concern the fellow, as long as she's not all wrapped up in something else at the moment.

I do this all the time, with all the characters and all the Muses. It's especially fun because we have an ongoing agreement that we are basically working with an enormous relationship map based on Greek mythology (and boy are there are a lot of kin-based and who-screwed-whom connections), and so if someone's Muse (like Tod's) involves Proteus, then it's considered perfectly OK for me to drag in anyone Proteus is related to in the mythology, using the logic above.

Unspoken, though, is the point that I really don't have that privilege regarding NPCs who are not thus obviously connected via Muses. I literally cannot drop Zeus onto the player-characters right now; as far as I'm concerned, that would be cheating. Even though someone recently narrated Phyxius (an aspect of Zeus) into play, it's not linked up through a Muse yet ... and so I'm not pushing that until someone else wants to act on it by spending points to build a Muse accordingly. At the moment, the bigwigs who are "fair game" to pull in this way include Athena, Ares, Hermes, Hades, and Atlas, only one of which has actually made it into play. It's about time I acted on all of these a little more strongly, actually.

Score manipulation
Now that we are all on the same page about the mechanics, let's finally talk about manipulating scores with Tricks. As a short term tactic, as opposed to the longer-term strategy regarding Muses and Muse resolutions, it's quite powerful - but you have to be cunning, opportunistic, and willing to accept that it'll occasionally backfire on you.

1. The easiest type: mess with your own scores or your foe's scores, and either continue the conflict from a now-improved tactical situation for the next draw, or hope (or negotiate) that whoever does get the high narration will do so. If you don't have the high Fate, and if the person who does chooses to end the conflict, then if you've done this, you're screwed - those points could've gone into Muses, and now all your manipulating (or most, see next topic) goes away.

2. The slightly more complex type: locking and unlocking. Well, once everyone has a hefty bank of fat Muses, then finally, this set of tactics is useful as hell. At the moment, at least two of the player-characters have Trick-inflated scores, maintained by locks, and one of has a score that's locked at its normal, rather low level by an enemy. The tactics for locking and unlocking, as well as the nuances introduced by the Metamorphosis urge, really are fun. As we've discussed before, none of this has any necessary connection with particular events or special-effects in the fictional world, but when they're utilized, the connection is often very satisfying, as with the "P" described above.

3. The incredibly important type: killing things or otherwise hammering them permanently. If a character's Power (or if the character is an Archon, his or her Arete or Hubris) is zero at the close of a conflict, he or she is dead. Case closed. Be careful; with a good draw against your character, he or she can get real dead, real fast. Obviously, in rules terms, the killer must "backpeddle" points that otherwise could have gone into Muses, and then alter the target's scores either with Metamorphosis or with Chaos.

This is related to the easiest type, not to the locking!! Matt's example in the book should be understood as "I will demonstrate locking and unlocking rules by talking about this example, which happens to include bringing a character back from the dead," which is different from the way it's written, which implies "The character's scores are locked up because she's dead."

So overall, this is the one exception to the idea that "score-manipulation is merely tactical in ongoing conflicts, plus the slightly-more permanent effects of locks." If you want to change something permanently in Nine Worlds, you gotta run its Power to zero and keep it there until the end of the conflict. It's the one place in which the "backpeddle" tactic becomes a serious issue, especially since revenge-killing is such a big deal in Greek myth.

But wait ... isn't resurrection, and trips to Hades, and so on also a big deal in Greek myth? Yes, they are. And since we now all recognize that the locks in the rulebook example aren't what "make the character dead," what do you do to resurrect someone?

Easy as pie. Here's my rules-suggestion for Nine Worlds - resurrection should be handled exactly as killing, just with the reverse: Power has to be given a positive value, up from zero, to the dead person. Clearly Cosmos is the obvious Urge to use, as Chaos is with killing, although just as with killing, Metamorphosis could also be used.

Also, this means the lock example in the book should not be read as "she's dead, represented by the locks," but rather (with a bit of amendment), "she's dead, so you'll need enough Cosmos tricks to give her some Power to bring her back," and the locks are merely extra nasty impediments to this goal.

One of the implications for our game is that we saw a hell of a lot of Cosmos in the last session for some reason, and at one point Proteus got invoked during the "elevate Nereus to godhood" ritual ... although that invocation didn't win the final narration, it did pump a couple of Cosmos points into Proteus, briefly (until the end of the round), and thus I narrated that "In Hades, the shade of Proteus stirs ..." It's likely that Gelons, Tod's character, hasn't seen the last of him yet ...

Best,
Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

Killing Proteus
Eero, I think you might be misreading Proteus in my posts as "Prometheus." The latter is indeed a major rulebook figure in the setting, and rather beyond the scope of the player-characters, I think. Proteus is a character that was introduced by Tod through his character's initial Muses, based on our intellectual jam-session about Greek myth prior to play; his Wikipedia entry provides some basics. The thing that struck us as a group was that this character is kind of mixed up, mythologically, with another fellow named Nereus.

Oops, yeah. And I know who Proteus is, I just was seeing what I thought I should be seeing there. Anyway, it seems to me that the importance of Proteus in your game has the same effects I outlined: players want to kill him (and do score manipulation on him) because he's clearly recurrent and important. I should think that this is important for GMing the game in general.

The outcome over our session is that Proteus betrayed Poseidon during the war with the Titans, that Nereus is a different (and nicer) godling altogether, and although his identity is tangled up with another similar figure, that figure is Glaucus , not Proteus. Tod decides that Proteus needs killing, and that Nereus/Glaucus can be elevated into a new sea-god - and with any luck, the Lost Armada can actually convince the Atlanteans to abandon their allegiance to the Titans. Very much a "brothers of the sea, tho' we be on different sides" kind of thing.

The thing is, I've been thinking that Poseidon and the titanic sea god whatshisname should both really be talismans, but I just can't figure out who'd own them. Perhaps they're just characters with really lopsided scores (like, only the Chaos urge) and no muses. The historical text indicates to me that they are clearly acting in the aether, and could even be crucial to any aether-based events if they could be roused... Perhaps all the best captains have one or both of the two as a talismans, representing the favor the captain holds with the god.

Here's how I manage these things, throughout all play of Nine Worlds, to keep myself from having a free, ongoing hand merely to throw conflicts and endless NPCs at the players in an unconstrained (and frankly, story-controlling and exhausting) way. I go by the character's Muses, at all times. In the first case, one of Manto's Muses was written, by her, as "Get my fucking Fleece back, you shyster. Medea is already on my ass." For my money, I now have carte blanche, signed by Maura herself, to bring Medea into play as enthusiastically and in as well-timed a manner as possible.

Seems sensible. How about, do you assign scores to unnamed NPCs or abstract impediments? Or are the characters assumed to succeed in everything they do, unless an important character resists it?

Score manipulation
Now that we are all on the same page about the mechanics, let's finally talk about manipulating scores with Tricks. As a short term tactic, as opposed to the longer-term strategy regarding Muses and Muse resolutions, it's quite powerful - but you have to be cunning, opportunistic, and willing to accept that it'll occasionally backfire on you.

A good outline. I dig the explanation about resurrection. After realizing that the examples should not be read as play examples so much as posed mechanics demonstrations all this is actually rather simple to figure out.

Here's something I've been thinking about escaping death: characters can sacrifice muses to avoid dying, which is cool. However, I'm noticing that the value of the Muse doesn't matter on this. This is a problem, because that means that a player should always have a couple of 1-point muses handy for sacrifice, which goes somewhat against the idea. Solution: if the zeroed value is locked in place, the muse used to escape has to be at least the same value as the lock. This way it's possible to make the escape a rather less trivial affair.