Gut-Punching Fairy Tales

[Joel P. Shempert]

Hi! I've been tooling around with an idea for Jake's Awesome Fantasy Game Contest (that'd be Jake Richmond of Panty Explosion, Sea Dracula and Ocean fame). I doubt I'll complete a draft by the deadline next Monday, which is fine because I don't think I fit the contest requirements anymore (nothing I'd call a Skill System, for instance), though Jake keeps encouraging me to enter it anyway.

But I'm still committed to working on this game, so here I am! I''m making a game about fairy tales, the kind where a troubled adolescent (or perhaps a pair of them) is dealing with some real-life crisis and works out these painful growing-u;p issues through a grueling fantasy quest. Modern examples include The Labyrinth, Gaiman and Vess' Stardust, Mirrormask, Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole, and Pan's Labyrinth. Some classic examples work too, like Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack the Giant Killer, but these tales tend no, in the form we generally have them in, to be nearly so intentional with their Coming of Age symbolism.

I've arrived at my basic structure from reverse engineering (with my friend Willem's help) The Labyrinth, arriving at the following principles:

• The fantasy elements the boy or girl encounters are heavily, symbolically related to the "real life" situation: either fantasy beings representing specific people in the hero's life, or they externalize the hero
  s inner struggles and issues.
• The story is all about transformation: the hero is growing into the adult person they're going to be, and transforming their "real life" crisis circumstances into something tenable.
• Other characters in the fairy-tale quest are either obstacles or allies; there can be crossover from one role to another, and the allies tend to end up casualties.
• Reaching the end of the Quest means confronting a centralized source/personification of the "real life" issues and adversity, and transforming both yourself and him/her/it.

So, looking at the Labyrinth, the girl, Sarah, begins in a situation of unwanted responsibility and burden--her mother actually demands that she babysit her little brother! Gosh! This crisis is actually pretty petty and overwrought, which means the real issues are especially internal--she's dealing with a heaping dose of teenage narcissism and selfishness, and learning, to her grief, that the world doesn't revolve around her. So she wishes she was divested of her responsibility so she can pursue her flights of fantasy in peace, and she gets her wish! Baby brother gone! So now she's got to go get him back, because she didn't want that, not really and spends the whole movie struggling to overcome the "Goblin King" and his armies and his deadly maze--really all the manifestation of her own desires.

So this whole time, Sarah (in my game) would be progressing through this Faerie world, encountering strange wonders that either bar her way or help her, leveraging her own qualities and those of her allies against adversity to meet and confront the Goblin King, to tell her desires, "You have no power over me!" I'm picturing this as a tight economy of resources in the hands of each player which are leveraged against each other and ultimately transformed by turning them over and rewriting them. So they'd be little cards on the table, like so:

Heroine: Sarah
_______________     _______________
|                          |    |                          |
| Good Quality:     |    |   Bad Quality:     |
| Rich Imagination |    |   Narcissistic      |
|_______________|    |_______________|


Bad Faerie
_______________     
|                          |   
|   Nemesis:         |   
|   Goblin King      |   
|_______________|   
_______________     _______________
|                          |    |                          |
|   Power:             |    |   Power:              |
|   Goblin Army     |    |   Labyrinth          |
|_______________|    |_______________|


Good Faerie
_______________     _______________
|                          |    |                          |
|    Ally:                |    |   Ally:                 |
|    Hoggle            |    |   Sir Dydimus      |
|_______________|    |_______________|

So we've got three players in different roles. This can scale up or down; for instance two heroes (brother and sister?), two Good Faerie players playing different Allies, or even scaled DOWN where the Hero player plays introduces and plays their own allies.

Everything on a card is fair game for transformation, sooner or later, which means granularity of the game elements representing characters needs to be calibrated appropriately. The hero is of course broken up into Qualities, which will individually transform to create a whole picture of the "new person" the hero becomes. Allies are only represented by a single card; as supporting characters their transformation is simpler. And the Bad Faerie has his own card to be ultimately Transformed, but also has Powers that must be transformed and overcome in order to reach him ("transform" the Labyrinth by navigating it, for instance).

One factor of this kind of narrative is that every element will be addressed and resolved in the course of the story. It's a very tight economy. There's no need to point out that a hero is impatient, say, unless that impatience will be tackled head-on in the course of his journey. So part of design is ensuring that there are just enough resources, and enough interactions, allotted each player to have everything introduced, expanded on, and resolved, in the course of a game.

So one thing is having the right number of resources. In the above diagram the Bad Faerie's got three, and the Hero and Good Faerie each have two. From the source material we could easily add "Irresponsible" to Sarah's Bad Qualities (I think it's important to keep to one good Quality), and add, say, Ludo the Rock Troll to the allies. Not sure what other Powers are possible for Jareth--freaky dreams, maybe? I know you're probably thinking Hoggle could count as a resource for the Nemesis--but that brings me to my next point;

The other thing is having sufficient interactions of resources. For instance, at the simplest level a resource could be used once, at which point it's flipped over and Transformed by writing the new version on the back. Or a Resource could be used and just flipped over, so that the next usage Transforms it. Or (and here's what I was alluding to with Hoggle), Resources don't have to stay in the hands of just one player: they can be passed around the table, so that using it puts it in the hands of your adversary, to use against YOU next. Two implementation Willem and I thought of: (1) When you use your Bad Quality it helps you overcome an obstacle (like a Power directed against you, say The Labyrinth won't let you in), for instance Sarah selfishly coercing Hoggle's help--but then you slide the Quality over to the Bad Faerie, who gets to use it against YOU at a later time, sliding it back to you. Only then will you have the opportunity to (still later, in response to another obstacle) Transform it, resolving that hangup into its final form.

Implementation (2) is: when an Ally comes to your aid, they interpose themselves between you and the obstacle--and are passed over to the Bad Faerie. The BF then gets a chance to Transform the Ally, making them, as I said, casualties in the Hero's struggle. In this case, Hoggle is tasked by Jareth with betraying Sarah, and is miserable and guilt-ridden. Or maybe, since Transformation is final, the Ally can get passed to the BF and only transformed if the Hero doesn't rescue them? That sounds satisfying, but requires some structure to determine how and when the hero CAN rescue them, as well as why they might not.

So if all the elements are in a balanced economy and all resolve, then the tension lies in how they resolve and the personal cost involved. For instance, for Sarah everything works out just peachy, but in Pan's Labyrinth resolution is more ambiguous and certainly more hard-won, and Swallow Me Whole even moreso. The general pattern is that a Hero starts out immature, conflicted and flawed, and ends up mature, wise and at peace--but there's certainly room for things to go the other way, or somewhere in between.

You may notice that there seem to be no dice or other typical "mechanics" involved. I'd like to keep it that way, sticking with a collection of narrative elements (on cards) that interact without complex rules or mathematics. I'd like to concentrate on the flow of the narrative and emotional investment in the issues being resolved. Any thoughts?

Peace,
-Joel

[Ben Lehman]

I don't really see any place in your post that, uh, invites feedback. I mean, I could attack your structure as a whole, but I don't think that would be productive.

What needs work?

[Joel P. Shempert]

Ben:

I see what you mean. Hmm. I think my hurdle is making that leap from concept to actualization. Which I think means nailing down the kinds of interactions the cards can have with each other and working out the number of interactions necessary to achieve complete economy of resolution. So for instance The Bad Faerie 2 powers that are used twice (Use once and flip, use again and transform), then the Nemesis himself which is similarly used twice. That means the Heroine and the Good Faerie need to have six uses of their Resources (or 7-9 uses if the Bad Faerie is temporarily receiving Bad Qualities and Allies for their own use) if the scales are to balance. And all while generating sufficient tension in play.

I'm actually thinking that wrangling over WHO gets to eventually transform the elements is where the sweet candy's gonna lie, especially in the elegant, diceless economy I'm working toward. So maybe THAT'S when an Ally interposes themselves between the Heroine and Bad Faerie, for instance: the Bad Faerie is about to Transform a Quality that they have in their power, and the Ally submits themselves for Transformation instead? Come to think of it, the Heroine could do the same thing with her Good Quality, sacrificing it to the BF's authorship so she can regain control of her Bad Quality and get a shot at resolving it favorably.

Maybe there's some room for your input there, and maybe there isn't. If that doesn't provoke any commentary, then maybe I just needed to "say it out loud" in a public place to get the juices flowing. I think I need to start writing out a text in the exact order you do stuff in play, so that I can figure out, well, exactly what you do in play.

Peace,
-Joel

[Ben Lehman]

So here's a question: Why do you need balance between the sides at all?

One of the things I'm struck by in this genre is the sense of imbalance. It's the heroine, who has no idea what she's doing, against everything big and terrifying that has destroyed a thousand children before her and will gladly destroy her without even noticing. Balancing the sides seems to work explicitly against that.

yrs--
--Ben

[Vladius]

Sounds pretty good so far.

Just for the concept, and if you don't mind a bit of pretentiousness, I recommend that you play a (computer) game called "The Path." It's a psychological horror (although a lot of people probably won't find it very scary) reinterpretation of Little Red Riding Hood, where there are six sisters, each with their own "wolf" that they encounter as a result of straying from the path to grandmother's house. Various symbolic and creepy things happen as a result, and there are tons of theories as to what actually goes on with each story as everybody deliberates on the multiple layers of interpretation.
I think it fits with the "old style fairy tales with attitude" thing you're going for.

[Skull]

Maybe the under laying point of the game should be that good is less powerful than evil and is forever in a struggle against to reach a kind of balance or middle ground.

[Joel P. Shempert]

Ben, perhaps you misunderstand me. I'm not talking about "balanced" in terms of two sides evenly matched. I'm talking about an ecosystem, at equilibrium, where no element is left dangling, but instead all fits into place, with just enough interactions to do so. In other words, every card will be Transformed by somebody. There won't be any loose ends at the game's conclusion where a player's left going, "huh. Never did resolve my Selfishness" or "never did defeat that Goblin Army."

What I'm realizing as I work this out is that the fruitful ground of play lies in the struggle over who gets to transform what element. Basically, if the player doesn't have the resources to Transform every element they want to, they're gonna have to pick and choose.

Vladius, thanks, I'd like to check that out.

Skull, I'm actually not trying to make it a "good vs. evil" game at all. I suppose my terms like "Good Faerie/Bad Faerie" might lead one in that direction, but this is actually about Coming of Age, pure and simple. Or messy and complicated, more like. But the idea is that an adolescent is confronting a world that just is what it is, and has feelings that just are what they are, and has to make sense of all that. The Goblin King in the movie isn't evil, he's just, as he keeps saying, giving the girl exactly what she wants. She has to come to terms with that, and with the unfairness of life, and the way her desires and responsibilities all interact, and so forth.

Peace,
-Joel

[Joel P. Shempert]

It's the heroine, who has no idea what she's doing, against everything big and terrifying that has destroyed a thousand children before her and will gladly destroy her without even noticing.

By the way, Ben, can I use this phrasing or variants thereof in my game text? It's beautifully put.

[Ben Lehman]

Knock yourself out.