[Mountain Witch] Under The Banner

[eddee]

Hix said:

Did my "You remember and are inspired by the way I lept at the kami's flying cannibal head" work for you, or was it too abstract?

I'd say I'd want my character to have something physical or tangible to tie the inspiration to (which admittedly isn't the way we've played it so far) - and some thing slightly exhaustable as well - like a distant shout - eventually your character would be too far away for mine to hear.


of other things:

1. Apparently the group is expected to split up (or at least the rules provide advice about that).

well, okay there seems a lot of game dynamics and expectations for us to - but until the dark fates really start kicking in there seems little real reason for the characters or the players to do so.

In game and out of it the group of ronin are obviously more capable of dealing with the trials of the mountain as a group. My character, for one, would not fancy facing the witch or the mountain on their own. - Which brings me to another question
Morgue - when does the game end?
When we kill (or fail to kill) the witch - or when we return from the mountain?
Like my thoughts on the size of the fortress and how many chapters it takes to get to the top of the mountain, it feels to me this effects the game play more than it might in other games.
I guess partly because the game is set out like a story, and partly because if one betrays someone and you know you have a whole mountain (with its dangers to face) to get down one might think twice - whereas if you know that the game will end with you still inside the fortress whichever way things go one could be much freer in the character's actions.
I guess this does boil down to - how much is the game an examination of trust - as opposed to a story dynamic beyond that?

* I didn't remember to complicate conflicts with complexity, with multiple crisis points forcing the ronin to split their forces. It didn't seem too problematic, but when I did remember it amped up the stakes massively - like an exponential increase. Something to note for next time...

Also Morgue, by splitting the conflicts you are setting up more aid dynamics - 'did Steph come and help me or Jamie?', might well effect trust allocations down the line whereas when no such split happens there is less player relationship complexity to go on.

And separate to all this:

... implying that other ordinary people still had easy access to the road to the Mountain Witch's fortress. However, the spooky wolf, mixed in with a few improvised bits of dialogue and business later, determined that the area around the Mountain Witch was incredibly heavy with spirit activity and normal people were few and far between. This may prove a hindrance in the kinds of bangs I can play with later on, since any ordinary person on the mountain will draw suspicion just by being there

Well, one of my big concerns about the game to date is we've been going up a mountain side (whether full of magic or not) and to conceive of random other normal people being there (in order to throw in elements of our dark fates) just seemed incredibly unlikely. Whereas I could easily imagine such in a journey across a landscape inhabited by villages and towns (like 'Seven Samuari' or  'Yojimbo',) - since it would be perfectly normal for elements of the dark fates to be wandering in and out of the story with ease.

In fact I would be quite keen to see the same game system set up and used in a different scenario.

[Note: should have photocopied those name lists - finding that page, and handing it around, was a bottleneck here and later when players and GM both were introducing characters and needing names.]

this is still true - just one photocopy of the name list would be useful since we are still introducing characters as we go!

ed

[timfire]

Hi guys! Sorry it took me a bit to respond, but I've been busy with GenCon and a sunsequent vacation.

Absent Trust
Actually, "Absent Trust" is forbidden according to the rules. Or more specifically, Aiding and Betrayal imply a direct, physical action taken by the character in question to help/hinder the other character. The Aiding/Betraying character must be present in the scene, and must do the deed themselves---following me? Aiding/Betrayal aren't "meta-game" mechanics, they are "in-game" mechanics.

(As a quick aside, I considered whether to make Trust more meta-game during development, but decided against it. I like the feel better as more of an in-game thing.)

Buying narration is a little different, as it is a "meta-game" mechanic. The character does not have to be present in the scene, nor is it neccessary for the character to be factored into the narration.

Now, dead characters are the exception to this rule, as they can use Trust whenever they want.

Complicating Conflicts
I do this sort of thing all the time. Actually, I like to place specific players on the spot. I say, "Player Z---player A is being attacked by this monster, and player B is becing attacked by that monster... Who do you help, A or B, or neither?"

I've found that conflicts and other situations that force players to choose---either choose between characters or choose between Fate/mission---work great. If I throw enough of these things at players, you'll start to see more and more alliances and rivalries and general PvP stuff start to develop. (The GM doesn't have to worry directly building PvP tension, just throw enough of these situations at the players and they'll do it themselves.)

Splitting the group
Splitting up the group (or simply letting the players do it themselves) works great. But remember to bring the charactrers back together for a bit. Remember, the game is all about the tension between characters, and the fun of seperating characters is seeing how they react when you bring them back together.

*****

Other than that, it sounds like things are going great! Alot of stuff happens as an emergent property of play, so do as Ron said earlier---"trust the Trust". Just sit back and follow the flow of the game, and watch the blood start flowing!

[hix]

Thanks for that, Tim!

I am nodding vigourously to your point about making sure to rejoining the others.  It's the way of really hammering home the consequences of your actions.

[morgue]

Cheers, Tim - I knew we'd picked a less-than-ideal time for seeking advice due to GenCon but hoped you'd be along eventually.  Thanks for the clarification and stuff.

Do you have any comment about the pacing of the game, related to Ed's questions about when the chapter breaks happen?  (I could make that a tighter question I guess...  um - when you run Mountain Witch, do you find your chapter breaks fall at roughly the same places every game, in terms of group dynamics and story progression?)

And thanks to all the players who've chimed in.  Will try to answer these queries in person on Thursday if I don't get a chance to do it here!

[Stephanie]

So, session three.  I came here to comment on Morgue's actual play report but there isn't one, so I get to make it all up as I go along.  ;-)

At the end of the last session, we'd just entered the fortress of the Mountain Witch via a tunnel providing water.  There'd been a big fight with some crabs and we'd just crawled into the kitchen, finding a kitchen made cowering under the bench in the process.  Goro, my character's brother-in-law had tried to escape, but had been dragged back.  Oichi (Steve) had then left with the gravely ill Geff-a-rey seeking medical aid, followed by Yamamoto (Sean) who wanted to keep an eye on her.  Oichi finds herself in a library, facing Kengi Tanaka (the general of the Witch's army), with Yamamoto concealed on a balcony.  They have a very meaningful conversation, with embraces and hints of a very strong past friendship.  Tanaka says that he cannot protect Oichi and advises her to leave immediately, Oichi asks him to change sides (I think I got that right?).  Oichi asks to meet him on the parapet at sundown.  She also asks for medical aid for Geff-a-rey so that he can complete his business with the Witch.  Tanaka says that it would be best to leave the injured man there and that he would fetch the mistress of the Witch.  Oichi says "Great, but I won't be here" and leaves.  Yamamoto silently backs up the corridor, then walks down it again, wheezing and coughing (he is quite an old man).

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, Sasashi (me) and Eto (Ed) are trying to calm the kitchen maid and ask her for directions.  Tohei (Jamie) is climing out of the tunnel we came in by - he was the heroic last line of defense buying time for the rest of us to get out, previously.  As we talk to the maid, we hear to Oni coming down the corridor talking loudly about how hungry they are.  Goro Sasashi gets out one yell before being gagged, the Oni call through the door "Is there anyone there, er, not a woman?" to which Sasashi calls "No, I'm cooking lunch for you" and gets ready for an ambush.  There's a big fight.  In the process, Tohei and Eto end up dragged into another room so that the Oni can deal with them more easily - one was snatched and the other followed to help.  Goro tried to fight on the side of the Oni and was skewered through the shoulder by Sasashi, along with snarls about "Where has your honour gone?".  When the fight is over, she asks him where he hid her daughter, he is about to answer, but faints.  (OOC That was because Morgue said he wasn't going to make it up for me, and I couldn't think of anything straight away.  I'm still getting used to this narrative control thing.)

The party reassembles and at Eto's suggestion ask the kitchen maid for directions to the Witch's Chamber of Secrets.  They spend a little time eating and cleaning up, Tohei takes the time to make a potion out of some moss that he had gathered in the tunnel below.  They sneak around a lot and eventually find themselves in a corridor with voices coming towards them.  They hide, and eavesdrop.  I think there was an argument between Yamamoto and Oichi at this point, but they got out of sight in time.  The voices were from Tengu chatting as they came off shift, and we were given the opportunity to say what they were talking about.  I put in the comment that the Witch's mistress (I forget her name) was really angry and eating her chamber maids, someone else that they were wondering if the Ronin had arrived yet, they decided no because Tanaka hadn't asked for more guards.  Maybe something else, but I can't remember what it was.  Anyway, their conversation had been extremely food oriented for the last ten minutes and they started talking about heading down to the kitchen which would have broken our cover.  We dive out from cover and there is a Big Fight in which the Tengu become so much spatter.  After it's over, Sasashi makes a point of moving the bodies into a side room and cleaning up the mess so people coming down this corridor wouldn't know that something is up.  For some reason people seemed to find the comment "Cleanliness is the virtue of a good wife" to be disturbing.  Go figure.

We end up in a courtyard that leads onto the bases of the tallest and second tallest tower.  (The latter is our goal.)  Although we are quite high in the fortress this courtyard is earth and is full of graves and shrines to the dead.  Sasashi can hear ghosts muttering, some about 'the Slave's Son is returning', others about the different ways they froze to death.  The courtyard is full of mist and in the half light of dusk it is very spooky.  We can see some distance away, a parapet on which Kengi Tanaka is walking.  Along the parapet lights start lighting one by one, apparently of their own volition.
We do yet more sneaking.  I'd say we should consider renaming the band to "Sneaking R Us" but that's about to change soon.  ;-)  We glide in underneath the mist, through the graveyard.  A ghost (of her dead husband) tries to possess Sasashi, but she manages to mostly get over it, albeit with a chapter wound.  They manage to make a distraction that gets the guards away from the doors of the tower and sneak inside.

Now, up until now, the cooperation of the group has been really good.  Everybody is working as a unit, everyone almost seems to trust each other.  That's all about to change.  Inside the tower is an old man, casually sitting who says he's the Keeper of Secrets.  He offers to trade information because he likes secrets.  He grins a lot, and already knows a lot about us.  The Slave's Son is Eto.  Sasashi refuses to say anything about her past in front of the others.  Tohei wanted to know where he could perform a ceremony which would activate the potion he'd made out of special moss.  Yamamoto shows the old man the contents of a scroll with an imperial seal which he has been carrying all this time.  (He will later give it to Oichi, who is interrupted by an arrival.)  They ask how to get to the "Chamber of Secrets" and the old man points to a very thin, almost invisible rope.  Eto climbs it, Sasashi follows as backup.  They encounter a Giant Spider (a Komi?) which they manage to defeat with help from the others.  They get to the top and Eto starts looking around for something to do with black powder.

Down below, the mistress of the Witch has just turned up in a gust of frigid air, demanding to speak with Oichi.  She claims that Oichi has stolen her lover from her and that she is going to take her to Tanaka for there to be an accounting.  There is a fight, in which she tries to sieze Oichi and drag her away.  Yamamoto hangs on, Sasashi clambers down and assists, Tohei stands by and watches.  In a really weird success, Oichi is pulled back outside and Yamamoto is swept off in her place.  The mistress, thinking that she has Oichi heads off to her throne room where she plans to have a showdown.  Oichi heads off into the mist after them, Sasashi follows as backup.

Up in the tower, Eto is entirely unconcerned by all this.  He has found the papers he was looking for, and uses the spiders rope to abseil down the outside of the tower, towards where the Mountain Witch is standing with Geff-a-rey and a cannon, looking pleased at how well it's looking right now.  Tohei notices this, and heads off to interfere.

Oichi and Sasashi are sneaking through the mist, unfortunately with guards after.  Migumi, the little daughter, is seen playing with some bones and giggling.  Oichi says that they're going to really embarrass her mother and would she like to help.  Migumi looks pleased and says she'll take care of the guards, but Oichi should look out for the ghouls.  Oichi and Sasashi are now facing four nasty looking monsters.  They dodge for a while but in the end Sasashi ends up holding them off while Oichi reads the scroll.  She is rather suprised by the contents.

Anyway, this is taking longer than I expected to write up so I'm going to take a break and will add more later.  My general comments though:
- By this point, Morgue's involvement was mostly cutting between different characters stories and saying "The hamster has _no_ idea where we're going guys"
- I think in the first session, everyone but Steve was a little bit flustered by being expected to contribute major details into the story; we were all used to the GMs doing that, and it felt very strange at first.  By the third session everyone was right into the swing of things, throwing in narrative elements that had to do with their Dark Fate like crazy and it caused the game to have this crazily fast momentum and a really hyper fun feel to it.  I can understand why Morgue didn't know where the game was going, because no-one else had a clue, either.
- I was reading some of the actual play reports on this site earlier, and one of them was commenting about a group that liked keeping IC secrets OOC secrets as well, which meant a lot of private conferring with the GM.  I don't think that our group would have had as much fun with that style of play.  We had a very little private chat with Morgue, most of it was upfront and out in the open.  That both meant that the game didn't get held up, and that we could mix in with other people's backgrounds better, both of which contributed so much to the momentum which is one of the things I'm liking a lot about the game.

Anyway, my 10 cents.  (2 cent pieces were taken out of circulation here years ago.  ;-))

Stephanie

[hix]

It was a fascinating, edge-of-the-seat kind of session, and the sense of energy in the room from all the players was actually pretty amazing.

Morgue started by framing a conflict in the kitchen with the three Ronin vs. some hungry Oni, and he was splitting dice pools all over the place, forcing the players to make decisions about what they wanted and who they wanted to help. There was a real sense of jeopardy here, with Trust getting low, and characters starting to get permanent wounds for the first time.

The conflict between Sean's character and my own (old, traditional ronin vs. young, rebellious ronin) escalated smoothly from friendly conversation through to brutal dice-rolling interrogations.  Sean would push me, then I would push back.  About halfway through the session, our characters were about to be discovered by wandering guards and I initiated a conflict with him to get to the truth of what was driving him.  It was a face-off to see who would crack first; no matter who won, we'd only get a few seconds to answer before the guards were on us. 

"Why did your Master really die?" I ask.
<dice are rolled> 
"Because of you!" says Sean, glaring at me.
The guards are nearly on us, so we split away from each other. In-game, it's to hide for an ambush, but really it because Sean and I want to milk the tension between us & use this new knowledge to build to a REAL confrontation later in the session.

That was the hallmark of this session for me. Players throwing Bangs at each other, revealing stuff made us look at each other and wonder what we'd gotten into here.  I've only GM'd, never purely played a highly-Banged story before, and I'm really growing to appreciate the time it can take to think up a 'right' response to a Bang - something that not only defines your character, but also ... it's like, if the Kicker let's a player say "This is what I want my story to be about," then a Bang lets them say, "This is what I want it to be about, right now!"

Example - at the end of Act 2, the Mountain Witch's Mistress bursts through the door.  Five minutes of Trust reassignment later, and when we restart, I use my Dark Fate narration to say the Mistress is here and angry at my character for trying to steal away her second lover, Kengi Tanaka.  It's way relationshippy, and entirely what I was into right at that point.  And it took about 5 minutes for me to realise that that's where I wanted to go.

... Also, we trust the Trust now.  It was incredible to see this reasonably competent group of ronin completely splinter over the course of about 20 minutes, as Dark Fates and secrets and competing motivations started to come out into the light.  The Keeper of Secrets had a lot to do with that, but I'll save that for another post.

Great game, Tim!

[Stephanie]

Right, the rest of the episode, as I remember it.  (I normally don't make quite so many typing errors as in the above post.  Stupid homonyms.  Anyway.) 
Eto had been abseiling to a rock close to where the Mountain Witch and Geff-a-rey had been standing playing with their new cannon.  Tohei caught up with them and they had a big confrontation about what their intentions were.  Eto declared his intention to kill Geff-a-rey, which Tohei didn't prevent, I can't remember what else they talked about.

In the throne room, Yamamoto was dealing with the Mistress and Kenji Tanaka.  After some talk that goes nowhere, the Mistress freezes ice over the entrances and declares that only one of them will leave the room alive.  Kenji immediately draws his sword, Yamamoto tries to talk his way out of the fight, but to no avail.  Oichi reads the scroll he gave her and discovers that Yamamoto was carrying an Imperial Death Warrant for her execution.  Nevertheless, after helping Sasashi escape from the ghouls, they both head to the throne room to rescue him.  Yamamoto has, throughout, been playing a really curmudgeonly misogynistic character, so this is a big deal for both our characters.  Oichi breaks through one of the frozen panes of ice blocking the way with her Break Down Doors special ability and they rush in.  Oichi claims to the Mistress that she has no romantic attachment to Kenji, but that because he had saved her life previously, she felt that she had a prior allegiance to him that she could not ignore.  Bother, I can't for the life of me remember what Kenji wanted her to do.  It was something important.  Anyway, the Mistress gets angry about all this and transforms into an ice dragon.  Sasashi gasps that this is the dragon that she dreamed of, when she mistakenly killed most of her family.  The Mistress winds herself around Kenji and threatens to kill him, and Sasashi is about to attack.  (Also present here are Migumi and a couple of chambermaids one of whom looks a lot like Sasashi, which I suspect will be resolved in the next session.)

So far, we have four Dark Fates out, and one to go:
Eto - True Motives - wants to obtain the secret of black powder, and kill the opposition, the strange foreigner Geoffrey.
Oichi - Past Allegiance - to Kenji Tanaka who saved her life previously.
Yamamoto - Revenge - against Oichi who was responsible for his master's disgrace and death.
Sasashi - Deepest Fear - the ice dragon which she is now facing.

The only one left is Tohei, and Morgue had said that the Act would not end until all the Dark Fates had been revealed.  At this point, Jamie, the player of Tohei, is wibbling rather a lot over the way the party had split up.  I suspect from an OOC point of view that he had an ambush planned which he couldn't pull off with everyone split up like this, so he had to change his ideas.  What he did was rush in to the Throne Room and offer to trade a life for a life - he would take Kenji Tanaka's place in the battle, in exchange for the right to take his place as general.  Yep, you guessed it, he had an Unholy Pact with the Mountain Witch.

Tune in in two weeks to find how it all pans out...

[Sean]

I've loved this game (thanks Tim) and the last session for me was far and away the most enjoyable - with one more to come... 

We've been talking about trusting the trust, but to be more precise, it seems to me it's about trusting the trust will be overcome.  The trust mechanism is the glue, the Dark Fate mechanism is the driver.

Dark Fates set up the oppositional nature of character goals - the slow build towards this in the first and second sessions gave me that thrill of 'something to look forward to', and then in this session it all exploded beautifully.  Dark Fate narration totally drove this episode - Morgue as GM introduced incidents and moments of conflict (my favourite was the introduction of the Ice Witch at just the right time to interfere with everything), but we as players spun those incidents, and added more of our own - this session flowed like a dream.

The Trust mechanism on the other hand gave the tension of possible failure to the game - too many Ronin were going too many different ways to make the most of the Trust, so we were in danger when isolated.  The Trust mechanism is essential to offset the power of the Dark Fates - it's best to go up the mountain together rather than face the dangers alone - and then at a certain point, the power of the Dark Fates driving the characters means that the group seperates and factionalises.

I love that combination of mechanisms.  Very nice stuff.

Cheers,

Sean

[morgue]

The Trust mechanism is essential to offset the power of the Dark Fates - it's best to go up the mountain together rather than face the dangers alone - and then at a certain point, the power of the Dark Fates driving the characters means that the group seperates and factionalises.

I love that combination of mechanisms.  Very nice stuff.

This is part of what I referred to earlier, when I mentioned that the power of Dark Fate narration was crucially important.  One concern I've seen about TMW is that the mechanical rewards for trusting each other are so great that a goup could easily 'conquer the mountain' if they stayed together - and that's motivation (both in-game and metagame) to resolve the dark fates in ways that don't lead to destruction.

My feeling is that there isn't a chance to do that.  Dark fates are created by the player, and are enacted by the player constantly through the game through dark fate narration.  This responsibility on the player makes it inevitable that the dark fate is not played down or avoided, but emerges fully into the game.

I believe the concern above might be valid if there wasn't Dark Fate narration - if the players weren't authoring their own dark fate constantly in the game.  But that narrating role is more powerful than the mechanical temptation of trust, no matter which group of players you're talking about.

It's quite audacious, actually - balancing an explicitly low-level system (benefits to in-game conflicts) against an explicitly high-level system (narrating power). 

[Stephanie]

End Game
On the parapet of the fortress, the Mountain Witch stares grimly at Eto, and agrees that he may fight a duel with the foreigner Geff-a-rey.  He hands a rifle to Geff-a-rey, who looks very surprised, but also supremely confident as he handles the gun.  Eto draws his sword, and readies himself for a duel.

***

In the throne room, Tohei is speaking to the Witch's mistress Yoki Ono, trying to persuade her to fire her current general Kengi Tanaka and take him in her place.  After a time, she releases Tanaka and appears to consider his proposal.  This is too much for Sasashi, who screams "Traitor" and leaps to attack Tohei.  Tohei ignores this, and himself attacks Tanaka, who, acting on Yoki Ono's orders, is attacking Oichi.  Oichi and Yamamoto have also leapt to attack but, perhaps more sensibly, they attack Yoki Ono the ice dragon.  Everybody connects, Sasashi even swirling around after her slice on Tohei and inflicting partial damage on Yuki Ono.  At last she has proven herself able to face her fear. 

***

Back on the parapet, Eto and Geff-a-rey face down for the duel.  They are closely matched - as fast as Eto is with a sword, he cannot outrun a bullet.  He succeeds in knocking the rifle out of Geff-a-rey's hands, but he is shot through the eye in the process.  Geff-a-rey hastily grabs an ornate pistol from the table nearby and aims to fire, but is knocked off the parapet by Eto's rush.  Eto stops and bows to the Mountain Witch, the duel is complete.  Oyama does not seem pleased however: "My favourite pistol is lost," he says, "retrieve it for me."

"I will do so but pray you will give me medical attention."

"You still have one eye to see."  The watching Oni guards sieze Eto, and throw him over the parapet.

***

Back in the throne room, the fight continues.  Oichi is attempting to persuade Tanaka to leave the service of the Mountain Witch, while Yamamoto and Sasashi continue to attack the ice dragon.  Migumi the little daughter of Oyama and Yuki Ono interferes, she weaves through the dancing blades and takes the sword of Sasashi away from her.  It turns to ice and shatters in her hands.  Tanaka is still very undecided, but takes one hesitant step towards Oichi.  This enrages Yuki Ono, and she fights harder and demands that Tohei fight for her.  Oichi steps between Tanaka and Yuki Ono, and the wave of cold coming off her rimes her face and hands, if she stays much longer she will be stricken with frost bite.  This seems to decide Tanaka, he moves further away from the ice dragon and seems to wish to reclaim his humanity.  Sasashi has ceased to fight.  Instead, she grabs Migumi and tries to persuade her to abandon her mother the ice dragon, to pursue the human part of her nature.  Cradling the girl gently, she heads for the door, where the girl she thinks is her daughter is standing.

***

Outside the fortress, Eto is standing shaking his head, watching blood spatter from his eyeless socket into the snow.  Near him is the dead body of Geff-a-rey, the red headed foreigner, the ornate pistol he was holding lying in the snow as if flung from his hand as he fell.  He picks up the pistol and stuffs it in his belt.  Above, he can see the mouth of a great cannon directed at him.

***

There is a great fight.  Oichi and Yamamoto are taunting both Yuki Ono and Tohei for their failure in guarding the fortress from their incursion.  Tohei tries to defend the defenses (as it were) by commenting that they are designed to weed out all who are too weak to serve the Mountain Witch.  Now that the samurai have made their way into the fortress, they have passed their auditon, and are worthy to be employed.  The dragon is hurt severely, and changes back into her human form, bleeding from many cuts, but all stop, as the great hall is entered by a figure walking with slow steps.  It is the Mountain Witch himself.

***

Eto looks up at the great cannon.  He can just hear Oni talking amongst themselves.  One says: "You fool!  That is the master's favourite pistol down there.  You will have to send people on foot to get him."  Eto shrugs, appears to consider these words, and starts running down the mountain, alone in the snow and the moonlight.

***

Oyama direct his attention at his wounded mistress.  "You fool," he says, "I gave you power and look what you did with it!  My general is taken from me.  My fortress is invaded.  Bah!"  He raises his hand to strike her but notices instead that Sasashi is holding his daughter.  "Hand my daughter to your relative," he says, "and serve me.  I will restore your husband to you."

Sasashi refuses: "He is dead now, you cannot restore to me anything but a shadow.'

He holds out a locket, the locket that Sasashi had given to the Kappa days before, "I can create him again, as flesh and blood.  All that you lost, all that you took from yourself, restored."

"Never!"

"Then die."

Inside her head, the ghost of her husband rises up and tries to take over her spirit.  She can tell that he is unwilling, but is forced by the power of the Witch.  Desperately, she sinks to her knees and recalls the happy times of their marriage, and their children.  Still cradling Migumi, she feels the chill of death weighing down her limbs.

***

Out in the snow, Eto leaps over a boulder and down a slope.  He is followed by three skeletons, all in the armour of the Sasashi.  Perhaps with the defection of Kengi Tanaka, the battle for the right to serve the Mountain Witch has begun again.  Over the soft sound of their footsteps in the snow, we hear the thud of drums.

***

Yamamoto and Oichi are fighting Tohei.  The Mountain Witch directs his Oni guards to assist Tohei, but they manage to push him out a window, and land in the courtyard below.  This fight is personal.  They ask him why he betrayed them, and he answers that all he wants is a lord to serve, that is the only source of honour for him.

***

In the throne room, Sasashi is unequal to the fight against the ghost of her husband.  Slowly she freezes to death.  (Sometimes the dice just don't go so well.)

*** 

At last Oichi and Yamamoto manage to kill Tohei.  Before his eyes, Oichi breaks the banner that he has carried all this time, and throws it onto him.  The last things Tohei hears are the words of Yamamoto: "You do not die without honour."

***

Eto, the samurai who climbed the mountain solely to steal the secret of gunpowder, torn and bleeding finally makes it down to the bottom of the mountain.  He sighs in relief, and reaches into his pocket to pull out the recipe.  Alas, it is gone.  It must have fallen out in his trip down the mountain.  All was for nothing.

***

And then, Oyama, the Mountain Witch strides out into the courtyard.  "Serve me, or die," he says.  Oichi and Yamamoto rise to strike, and with a wave of his hand they are halfway up the mountain on the field of the great battle between the Sasashi and the Tanaka.  The ghost of Sasashi, looking rather suprised, is standing there also.  In her hands, she holds a sword made of shining ice.  The samurai realise that this is a battle not just of swords, but words also.  They tell the Witch he is nothing, he has lost his humanity.  The three rush to attack, Yamamoto leading the charge, the two women that he despised when he began this quest his only supporters.  From the sides Oichi and Sasashi both slice through the Witch, he is in doubt, he had not realised the possibility that he might lose.  As they cut through his physical form, it dissolves, leaving only the rags he was wearing and a ghostly form that rages against Yamamoto.  At last Yamamoto wins the battle of wills, and the Mountain Witch is defeated.

Sasashi looks at them both, and asks that they care for her child and Migumi.  Oichi readily agrees, Yamamoto takes longer, but eventually says "I shall."  Sasashi nods and walks away into the forest, where they can see the form of her husband and two dead children.

And then they are back in the courtyard.  Tanaka walks up to them and nods.  He turns to the Oni guards who are looking confused.  "The Witch is dead," he says, "and your power is gone.  See, morning comes soon.  You must flee."

Yamamoto and Oichi finally have their showdown, the personal dispute they had put aside to fight Tohei.  It transpires that Yamamoto's former master Nagasaka had committed suicide on seeing the Imperial Death Warrant for Oichi's execution - Nagasaka was Oichi's father, and was horribly shamed by her heinous crimes.  Yamamoto had come to carry out the warrant, but was now struck with indecision, he now owed a debt of honour to Oichi, also.  Oichi is also struck with indecision.  She, who had previously had a very flexible sense of honour, had realised that there were consequences to her actions.  One of these consequences is that she too owes a debt to Yamamoto, and cannot simply kill him as convenience would dictate.  Eventually, Yamamoto realises the only appropriate way out of their dilemma is to kill himself, which Oichi prevents (there was a dice duel at this point), saying that Yamamoto had a higher duty to care for Migumi and Sasashi's daughter as he had promised, that this oath overrode any other concern of honour.  Also, she promises to retake the name Nagasaka, and to take her rightful place as Yamamoto's lord.  Yamamoto agrees, his honour now broken; they gather the two girls and leave the fortress.  Overhead they hear an anguished scream as Yuki Ono, the dragon flies up away into the sky, never more to return.  Thick heavy clouds race over the sky, dumping a huge weight of snow over them all, and then, just as quickly, race away leaving a clear, quiet sky, and the soft breath of the first wind of spring. 

They leave and credits appear on the screen: "Under the Banner, a Morgan Davies Production".

The credits roll over images of Yamamoto, Oichi/Nagasaka and the two girls walking down the mountain.  The snow is melting, and they see the buds of flowers peeping out.  Migumi playfully pokes at Yamamoto to be brushed kindly aside.  A rush of leaves blows into Oichi's face, and as she brushes them away she finds a piece of paper.  It is some doggerel about a black powder.  She shrugs and throws it over her shoulder.

The final image is of the fortress of the Mountain Witch slowly dissolving and crumbling into nothing.  All that is left is the body of Tohei, dead, holding the pieces of his broken banner.

GMed by: Morgan Davies
The Cast
Tohei: Jamie Norrish
Eto: Ed Lynden-Bell
Sasashi: Stephanie Pegg
Oichi: Stephen Hickey
Yamamoto: Sean Molloy

The End.

Thanks, guys, that was a truly awesome game.  :-)

Things I Found Interesting:
- I liked the granularity of the conflict resolution.  Huge amounts of narrative can swing on a single dice roll, and the fact that the winner gets to narrate the outcome means that everyone is guessing about where the game is going.  There's no way you can beat on someone and confidently expect to win eventually through attrition, on every dice roll you could live or die.  I thought that was cool. 
- Steve, Sean and Morgan have all written professionally.  I write as an amateur and would like to better myself.  I wonder if that had an effect on the way the game panned out with everyone leaping in with plot elements and aggressively pushing emotional story lines.
- Eto/Ed had to leave early, and Sean gave him a ride, so was absent for about 20 minutes.  In the gap we ended up talking a lot OOC about family and family relationships.  Since this turned out to be the big theme for three of the characters, that was interesting supporting interaction.
- It turned out that Jamie/Tohei's grand plan which he didn't get to carry out, was to hold a tea ceremony with the potion he had made out of the moss.  As billed, it would have made us able to see the invisible soldiers, but by taking us partway into death.  He had planned to bring us into the presence of the Witch and announce "Behold!  I have brought new servants for you, see, they're already partly dead."  Cool, neh?
- For all that we were there to kill the Mountain Witch, that fight turned out to be a bit of an anti-climax, we were so much more interested in Yuki Ono and our own personal dramas which were either completed or about to be completed by then.
- Throughout the game, the cold was such a presence that it felt like a character in its own right.  The whole way through there was snow, and cold wind, and trekking through storms, and thick heavy mists thronged with ghosts, and ice, and frostbite.  It was a wonderful atmospheric effect, to the point that at the end of the game I was jumping up and down insisting on narrating the closing credits with the clouds blowing away and the first soft breath of spring arriving.
- My experience of shared narrative games, (this, the Lucky Joneses that Steve is developing, and hearing people talk about PTA) is that they all seem to revolve around the idea of a film or a TV series.  I think in part this works because using the framework of a known type of story gives people a structure to work with that they can't get from the GM in a shared narrative format, but also because films and TV episodes are a very compressed story format.  They have a limited amount of time to explore their story and finish it, which means that every thing that happens in the form is building up to the ending.  These games likewise seem to revolve around plot points that will matter crucially to the ending, unlike many campaigns that I've been in that keep on going with subplot after subplot until the players find other things to do and leave the game.  One of the effects of this is that in playing the shared narrative games I often feel quite detached from the character, much more of a puppetmaster directing my attention on a restricted space of activity and entertainment than I normally do.  I'm very aware of the conventions of the base genre, and I'm very aware of deliberately linking in with other character's storylines and working on the story's themes than I normally am.  On the other hand, there were some moments in Mountain Witch that were extremely immersive, so I can't take that as a hard and fast rule.  Interestingly, one of the big things for immersion for me in this game was the idea of cold that I mentioned above.
- Going back to the above point that the shared narrative games I've directly encountered all seem to work heavily with the idea of a film or TV format as a base (how very post modern ;-) ), I wonder if anyone has written a shared narrative game that works off the idea of a novel or short story, and how that would change the format of the game.

And it's time for my dinner,

Cheers,

Stephanie

[morgue]

Thanks for posting that Stephanie.

Two rulesy issues came up in the final session:

1) A big, complicated, multidirectional conflict where a was attacking b, while b was attacking c, while c was attacking d, while d was attacking e...  The upshot was that everyone was willing to ignore, and thus lose, one conflict in order to engage in another.  "I will let 'a' get his stakes so I, 'b', have a chance of achieving mine."  We decided (in order to get play moving again after we'd drawn a chart of the conflict with arrows) to say the precise outcome of an unopposed combat conflict is determined by an unopposed dice comparison - as if the 'defending' player had rolled a 0 on the dice.  So the attacker rolled, and added betrayal bonus or injury penalty as appropriate, and compared to the 'defender''s total of 0 less injury penalty.  That gives the margin, which gives the precise outcome (partial success, regular success, or whatever) which is important in terms of damage.

Was there another way in which this could have been handled?  This solution worked fine to keep the game going and seemed to preserve the integrity of the system, but I wonder if there's an obvious alternative we missed?

2) In our game, the biggest betrayal happened when Tohei announced his plan to become the General.  This betrayal was enacted in roleplaying - and while we could have turned the interaction into a conflict, such didn't seem natural.  The result was that when Tohei's betrayal became an actual conflict, the characters had all known about it for several minutes of game-time and the players for a longer period of real time.  There was disagreement over whether any character could use a betraying bonus at this point, given that the surprise aspect of the betrayal was gone.  In order to move the game along, we took a quick vote, which was won by the side that said betrayal bonus could still be applied (as it represented more than surprise).  Actually, at this stage (and because there had been so little betrayal in the game - I think this was the only instance where it was used?) I screwed up the rules on how the betrayal bonus worked anyway, but that aside I would be interested to hear opinions on this issue.  (Or have I misread the trust/betrayal rules again somewhere?)

--------

A wonderful and memorable game.  Ron's hamster post at the beginning was indeed how it transpired - more and more I sat back as the game went on.

My experience was this:

* importance of GM prep and guidance in Act 1: high
* importance of the above in Act 2: fair
* importance of the above in Act 3 and 4: low to nil

The only other advice I have for GMs in the endgame is to keep clearing space around the characters for them to resolve their own conflicts.  I could have kept throwing bad guys at the ronin all day but the clear focus of interest for everyone was the ronin's relationships.  Adversity in the very final stages should be applied carefully, so as not to upstage the interactions between the ronin.

I hope this thread serves its goal as a resource for future TMW GMs as to the kinds of encounters to prepare for the early stages of the game, and as reassurance that you don't need to prepare much at all in the later stages of the game.

To align it more closely with Forge Actual Play posting goals, it would be good to add more detail about what the group really enthused about and responded to in play but from my semi-spectator's chair it seems the answer is 'all of it'.  Players are invited to contribute more detail on this stuff!

[timfire]

Hi guys!

The Betrayal thing: Yes, very often the most gut-wrenching betrayal are role-playing moments, not neccessarily conflicts. That's fine.

In one of my playtests, I made this deal with another PC that I would help them kill a third character if they helped me. But in the meanwhile, I started Aiding the third PC, initially because I wanted to keep them alive. But our characters started becoming friends through this. So when the moment came for me to fulfill my promise, it was gut-wrenching. It was the worst/best "betrayal" of the game. But I never used the third PCs Trust against them. As a sign of our friendship, I choose to Aid the other player, rather than mechanical Betray my friend.

The Betrayal mechanics are there to give bite to Trust. You guys did right by still allowing the player to use their Trust even after the thematic betrayal. That's the double edge of Trust--you can't take it back if the player proves themselves untrustworthy (until the next chapter, that is). Allowing players to drop their Trust whenever they want removes much of the bite of the mechanics. If you need a narrative for this, you can say that the character still holds residual trust for their fellow ronin even if the ronin acts in ways that runs counter to the character's interest.

Conflict thing: This is a bit tricky---were all those characters PCs, or did it include NPCs? Technically, according to the rules, a Conflict can never have more than 2 sides. You're suppose to group people together who share targets, even if narratively they aren't working together. You then roll the dice and let the highest die narrate how it all plays out.

So you had A -> B -> C -> D -> E? I would have split the group into A, C, E against B, D (notice how everyone is attacking someone on the other side?). Following me?

GM prep: I totally agree with you that more prep is required in the beginning than the end. I tried communicating this in the book, but not very successfully. (I'm in the process of re-writing some of the GM advice, but that still won't be available for a bit.)

The Witch: The Witch's importance varies from game to game, but I think you guys now realize how (as I said in the book) he's really just a McGuffin. The Witch's death is very often an anti-climax, just a box that needs to be checked off... Well--that might be exaggerating things, but the climax of the game is the moment characters are forced to confront one another, which very often happens right before the battle with the Witch, or right after.

[morgue]

Thanks for the comments, Tim.  For what its worth, I didn't think the battle with the Witch was at all an anti-climax.  Several players actually ended up using the Witch as a symbolic proxy for the path not taken/the opposite of everything they value/other heavy character-type stuff.  The narration actually made clear that the Mountain Witch was defeated because the ronin pointed out how his supposed 'honor' was really just a cover for his deep sense of shame.

Getting specific on the conflict thing:

Conflict thing: This is a bit tricky---were all those characters PCs, or did it include NPCs? Technically, according to the rules, a Conflict can never have more than 2 sides. You're suppose to group people together who share targets, even if narratively they aren't working together. You then roll the dice and let the highest die narrate how it all plays out.

So you had A -> B -> C -> D -> E? I would have split the group into A, C, E against B, D (notice how everyone is attacking someone on the other side?). Following me?

I did consider splitting as you say, but decided against it.  I'll see if I can reconstruct the reasoning.  (I should point out, this problem didn't interfere with our enjoyment of the game at all!)

A was a player character, Sasashi, who wanted to kill Tohei.
B was a player character, Tohei, who didn't care to oppose Sasashi but wanted to kill Tanaka.
C was an NPC, General Tanaka, who wanted to protect Yuki-Ona by attacking Yamamoto
D was a player character, Yamamoto, who wanted to kill Yuki-Ona
E was an NPC, Yuki-Ona, who wanted to kill Yamamoto (D)
F was a player character, Oichi, who wanted to Aid Yamamoto

So we ended up with:
A => B => CE <=> DF

If I remember right, I didn't think it right to fold Tohei (B) in with Yamamoto and Oichi because Tohei had just betrayed Yamamoto and Oichi, and wanted to kill Tanaka in order to take his place.  He also was diametrically opposed to Yamamoto and Oichi's sole goal of killing Yuki-Ona.  If we had folded this in, there would have been virtually no chance of Tohei achieving his goal, because narration would probably either go to me (if Tanaka or Yuki-Onna had rolled highest), or to Yamamoto + Oichi's combined Aid total.  This didn't seem a fair representation of the fact that Tanaka's decision was to ignore the threat from Tohei in order to aid his mistress.

In other words, we could have folded Tohei in, but it would have felt wrong - the game mechanics probably wouldn't have generated an outcome that seemed 'right' (whether in terms of story, realism, or whatever other criteria are going on behind the scenes.)

The same logic was used to keep Sasashi separate, because Tohei had explicitly made the same choice as Tanaka to ignore the danger to himself in order to achieve his goal.

Hope that makes sense.  Our solution worked for us, in any case :-)  Cheers!

[timfire]

So we ended up with:
A => B => CE <=> DF

If I remember right, I didn't think it right to fold Tohei (B) in with Yamamoto and Oichi because Tohei had just betrayed Yamamoto and Oichi, and wanted to kill Tanaka in order to take his place. He also was diametrically opposed to Yamamoto and Oichi's sole goal of killing Yuki-Ona. If we had folded this in, there would have been virtually no chance of Tohei achieving his goal, because narration would probably either go to me (if Tanaka or Yuki-Onna had rolled highest), or to Yamamoto + Oichi's combined Aid total. This didn't seem a fair representation of the fact that Tanaka's decision was to ignore the threat from Tohei in order to aid his mistress.

Hmm. Let me say up front that it was fine what you did, I'm not a rules-Nazi. But here's how I would have handled it:

If Tohei didn't care to oppose Sasashi, then Tohei should have been automatically killed, period. It's Vincent's "Shut up or roll the dice" rule.  If you didn't want to see your character killed, then that's a conflict and you should have rolled dice.

If Sasashi's player didn't care about Tohei attacking Tanaka, then I would have let you roll the dice against Tanaka and then declared you dead after the roll. If Sasashi's player did care, then you could have had the conflict stakes be Tohei is able to attack before being killed/ Tohei is killed before making his attack. Another option is that you could have declared an Ai-Uchi (Mutual Strike). That would have guarranteed both your own death and the death of Tanaka.

This goes for everyone that didn't care to oppose.

I still would have grouped Tohei with Oichi and Yamamoto. Mechanically, it's irrelevent if you guys hated each other or not. The fact is, you were both going after the same the person. If you had killed Tanaka, then you would have been doing Yamamoto/Oichi a favor (or vice versa). In that sense, you guys were working "together", even though you guys hated one another. The same goes for Sasashi and Tanaka/Yuki.

The trick here is realizing that the mechanics of the game have nothing to do with the narration. It's like that example in the book, where the character wins the fight by narrating a pillar falling on the bad guy (do you know what I'm talking about?).

See, you guys wanted alot of stuff to happen in just one round. If you had all been grouped like I suggested, then what would have happened is you guys would have been forced to fight a couple of rounds, in which time all the stuff you wanted to see would have been resolved. What I mean is, in the first round, it was likely that Yamamoto/Oichi would have injured or killed Yuki-Onna. With her out of the picture, they might have dropped out, which would have left Tohei, Sasashi, and Tanaka to battle it out. Depending on how that went, you might have been forced to go a third round.

I would have encouraged this type of situation, 'cause neccessity breeds strange bed fellows. Maybe Sasashi would have willingly Aided Tanaka, in order to get Tohei out of the picture. Then how would everyone have reacted to her? (Nothing probably would have changed, but you never know.)

But again, what you did was fine in the end.

[morgue]

Thanks Tim, I entirely see and appreciate your logic.  If we'd had a bit more time to think about it we might have come to the same conclusion!

And I guess that's the end of this thread :-)