[TSOY]Easter Sunday Shadow

[Mike Holmes]

So I get this mail that says that Paul Czege is coming to town with Danielle to, amongst other things, do some RPG play with Josh and myself. We discuss it online, and somehow I end up being GM for a game of TSOY scheduled on Sunday.

Matt Wilson can't make it because he's going to be out of town, and Jason Blair can't come in on such short notice on Easter Sunday. So I have three players to work with. We do chargen online, and I suggest that we should play in Ammeni. Why? Because I like the idea of intrigue in a steamy swampy kinda place. No other reason, really.

Chargen happened online before they came, and something interesting happened there. While Danielle decided on a Goblin entertainer for a character, Josh and Paul both decided on assassins. Check out their characters here (Hermia, Jorje Melaqua, and Pascal Le Froid): http://random.average-bear.com/TSOY/ExampleCharacters

What's notable is that Ammenite's tend to be assassins. Assassins in love. Note that neither player had seen the Wiki page before creating their characters (at least not that I'm aware of). We noted that the chargen options combined with the setitng presentation, seemed to strongly suggest certain tropes. But we went with it anyhow, noting that with different keys, the characters had a lot of different thematic potential.

For prep, I used the relationship map from the TV show Dallas. The central character headed the household for which Josh's assasin worked, and for whom Hermia entertained - while secretly spying for another house. That second house, and a third that employed Paul's character were invited to a feast, bringing all of the salient characters together.

I set the Experience dial on high speed, due to the fact that this was a one-shot. Instead of the normal 10 EXP to get an advance, I set it to 5. Looking back, I think that I should have gone with 6, because at 5 a player could buy off a Key, and immediately buy two more with the proceeds. If that had only been one and change, I think it would have been better paced. Not that the players abused it or anything, just that 5 seemed a tad too fast. For really short campaigns, I'm thinking that 7 or so is probably optimal. I do like how tweaking this figure affects the pacing, however (not that I've played with other levels, but just that I can imagine the effects).

Paul's character had the key of vengeance against his master because he'd been passed over for promotion, bonuses, special equipment, missions, etc, etc, in favor of another assassin apprentice. Josh's assassin was in love with a member of the household for whom Danielle's goblin was spying.

Well, I ran it almost as a Moliere farce, with everyone in bed with everyone else who they shouldn't be (actually just a compression of the Dallas timeline), and eveyone else telling everyone else's secrets. Before long, the assassination that Josh's character had been assigned to commit before the party ended up spurring all sorts of action that had both assassin PCs facing off against each other (in a scene that I imagined as very John Woo-ish), and then them allying. Paul's character ended up killing everyone he needed to, and a few others got killed in the crossfire as well. In the end, Josh's character had to flee, but Paul's character became the new house assassin (IIRC).

Lots more detail in between. The players can add more where they feel neccessary. What you may notice missing above is what happened to poor Hermia. Well, see, from Paul and Josh I got kickers. Being experienced with this sort of game, they both automatically created premise-laden characters. Danielle's goblin's only key was one she came up with, the Key of Entertainment. Now, I think it's an OK key, actually, but I found it hard in the context of the character to come up with conflicts around. Her other conflict, of course, was that she was spying for the other house, but if revealed, this didn't leave her many choices. In the end, she did have to decide to flee, too, but it didn't seem all that thematically laden. In fact, at one point in play we I had to stop, and actually asked for ideas for bangs for her character. And we didn't come up with much.

Basically, I think that TSOY has a lot of premise for characters if the players grab it to start. I think that for some players not used to this, however, that they can "miss" the boat here. Or that for GM's like me that it's not easy to see where the premise is on some characters that are really rather normally generated with the system.

I guess that I'm saying that it's pretty abashedly narrativism supporting. Which ain't all bad. I think that it might suit a lot of people out there who haven't become as dependent as, perhaps, I have on mechanics that really push narrativism (or at least in which premise is quite easily graspable).

Anyhow, it was loads of fun to play, and this one little hitch didn't put a dent in that. The evocative setting had us all on the same page in terms of what the SIS looked like, I think, and everyone enjoyed the steamy swampy intrigue feel. At least I know I had a great time. :-)

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

After an extended game of Legends of the Five Rings a few years ago, I came to a conclusion: characters are more fun when they're more alike than they are different.

It was a real shift in what I started looking for in new games. "9 races and 17 professions!" had never held much appeal for me, but now I saw it as a real downside.

Paul and I talked about this a long time ago too, when he described how he'd tried to organize a D&D game in which all the player-characters were clerics. And Dav Harnish and I, after that L5R game, decided that a samurai game we'd prefer would be about bushi, bushi, and only bushi - never mind the stupid wizards and so on. Right about then I started working on Trollbabe.

So it seems to me very appropriate that the game worked best in the context of, "We're assassins, so what will we [individually] do?" It also makes sense, unfortunately, that when you have three out of four people invested in this very interesting question, that the fourth person is going to get excluded.

Not that I think any deliberate exclusion was occurring, but when the call for Bangs goes up across a whole group and nothing happens, it's pretty clear that the character in question is simply out of the current creative loop.

The Shadow of Yesterday is simply brimming with Color, which is a great thing. I've noticed from all the play accounts that it tends to shift very hard toward a series of given "niches," by which I don't really mean specific characters, but rather given relationships among characters:

- assassins in love
- goblins in love with rather repressed human
- ratkin in family feuds

There are a couple others that probably lurk in there, wrapped up with the elf stuff and the weirdo magic language.

My point is that I'm not sure these things mix well. It seems to me that if I were to play Shadow of Yesterday, I'd probably push for some unity for the "niche" rather than saying, wowza, everyone make up something colorful and we'll see what happens.

Best,
Ron

[joshua neff]

I actually had initially considered having an assassin who suddenly didn't want to kill people, but was still loyal to his house--with the Key of the House and the Key of Compassion. But I really like complicated love stories (as, I think, does Clinton), so I went with that.

Stuff I liked: the quick resolution, the way the Keys work, and Bringing Down the Pain. I know others have commented that they thought it was clumsy, but I found it to be quite elegant and fun. Of course, I'm used to extended contests in HeroQuest, maybe that has something to do with it. And the Gift of Dice was as cool as I've imagined it.

Stuff I didn't like as much: when your abilities are rated at 1 or 2, which many are for starting characters, it seems you roll quite a few failures in conflicts, which could be frustrating. There was one sequence where a character was chasing my assassin, who was trying to Stealth away. We were both Bloodied, so rolling penalty dice. And we kept rolling failure after failure--he failed to catch me, but I failed to lose him. It became this almost pathetic chase, ending only when he finally rolled a success and I rolled another failure.

But overall, I really liked the game. I definitely want to play more of it.

Mike also failed to mention that he really tried to amp up the color by serving "Ammeni-esque" food (sushi, raw beef, pineapple, shrimp) throughout play and making a potpourri that would make his house smell "exotic." Nice touches.