[Land of a Thousand Kings] Of Castles, Pyramids and Fisherman Kings

[Gabrielle]

Last Friday I play Land of a Thousand Kings with two friends of mine and one of my friend's ten-year-old sister. The ten-year-old, Julia, had been up too late several nights running and has no experience with anything fairy tale like or fantastical and not a lot of experience with fiction. So she was insanely giggly and completely beyond her frame of reference. Her sister, Jana, was also pretty tired and about five months pregnant. Jana's only role playing experience is play testing my brother Seth's work in progress A Flower For Mara which is a combination role playing game and improvisational play.  That left my friend Raquel, who has some role playing experience, but all indie games, and me. I'd played Land of a thousand kings twice and Raquel's played once. And it worked. It worked very well.

Because I had the most experience role playing in general and playing Land of a Thousand Kings in particular I was GateKeeper. I was having a really hard time explaining the game to Julia because I'd only met her that night, she wasn't at her best and we have just about nothing in common. So I dropped any sort of rules that were at all long term and just went with what we needed to play that night. I left out Excellences, Abilities, Spirits, and Memories. And when I read over the play test rules I decided to totally drop Preparedness because it just looked like it would add complicated without adding any niftyness.

The memory sharing at the beginning went very well. It was a little tricky because Raquel and I had only met Julia that evening and so didn't have many memories of her and she didn't have any of us. But I tend to think that passing at this point is tantamount to cheating and since I really wanted her to have fun I knew she needed points. So we just got creative.

I sent Jana and Julia off together to someplace with castles and horse drawn chariots. I sent Raquel by herself because the other time she'd played she'd been with someone else and hadn't had a lot of opportunities to step up and do stuff. Strangely, Raquel's first time playing she'd been put with her older sister and now it was Julia's first time playing and she got placed with her older sister. They had similar issues of the older sister automatically taking charge.

Neither of the stories were very deep or introspective. I had done absolutely no prep, which was cool, and was just shooting from my hip. Jana and Julia had to negotiate with the Castle King to let the Pyramid King pave the road that lay between their kingdoms. Whenever the Pyramid people ride the road the dust flies up and gets in their eyes which is very painful. But the Castle King didn't want them to pave the road with their gold stones because his wife said that it wouldn't match her dress and then she would be mad at him and wouldn't give him his breakfast. Jana in particular was very good at sucking up to the Queen. Raquel was asked by the Water King, a fisherman sort of king, to free his kingdom of the Great Marlin that had been eating all their fish. So she had to go find the Great Marlin and then help him lead his children someplace away from the Water Kingdom. 

Land of a Thousand Kings felt very similar to a party game. The point, at least when we played it, wasn't to tell an intricate story full of character development, plot twists and angst, but to enjoy spending time with each other through the game. I'd wanted to play this game with some of my friends because it brings out memories that don't usually come up in everyday conversation, but that are important to people. I feel like I know a bit more about Jana and certainly about Julia because of the game. That was what I wanted from it and it worked exactly how I wanted. And that was only playing with half the rules.

[Ben Lehman]

Hi! This is cool! Thanks for playing.

You made the right decision on Preparedness. Man does that rule suck.

I've got some questions:
1) How did the players interact with the world? Did they seem to take it credibly?
2) Did you use any action? How did it turn out?

In the future, if you're doing stripped down version, I'd leave in Memories. Everything else seems like it can go in the short-term, though. In fact, I kinda like disallowing excellences and artifacts until the second trip. Probably I'll change the rules to that effect.

yrs--
--Ben

[Gabrielle]

1) How did the players interact with the world? Did they seem to take it credibly?

If I understand your question right then yes, I think all the players decided to play pretend with me and act like the places they landed were real. There wasn't a lot of different places they went, though. For Raquel's story there were essentially only two sets and for Jana and Julia's there were only three. But still the Castle King was made out of rock with a castle for a head and they didn't think that was too outlandish.

Something I'd forgotten until right now was when it really clicked for Julia. They showed up on the road that ran from the Castle to the Pyramid facing the Castle off in the distance. A chariot came racing past them towards the castle driven by a giant rock-man. I asked where they wanted to go. Jana was all for going to the Castle, but Julia wanted to go the other way because you never know what's behind you. I thought that was really cool and then I had to figure out what was behind them.

2) Did you use any action? How did it turn out?

No, not a lot of action. There weren't even a lot of conflicts. I had to push for the first conflict with Jana and Julia and after that there didn't really seem like a good time to push for it again. Raquel too only had one conflict where the Great Marlin had gotten into the boat with her to talk and then was about to leave before she'd had a chance to ask any questions so she grabbed him by his fin. He told her to let go, she said no, we went to dice and I lost.

What was cool, though, was seeing Raquel come to understand how to use the post conflict narration. She said that her condition was "Unscathed" so when it was my turn I couldn't give her a physical wound. It was annoying in a really satisfying way.

The game we played was a really friendly game and a fairly calm game. There weren't a lot of conflicts and there wasn't a lot of action. If we play again I will probably step up the pressure, but for that night with those players it worked much better this way.