Have you used the Clan Profile?

[Peter Nordstrand]

Hi,

The Clan Profile from Orlanth is Dead is a neat toy. However, I would very much like to hear people's opinion of its usefulness in actual play.

Have you used it for your campaign?Why? Why not?

Who picked the answers to the questions? The narrator? The players? How were they picked? Was your method of answering the Qs a good one, or do you wish you had done it differently?

To what extent have you referred to it during play? Was it worth the trouble? Wouldn't it just have been better to come up with a short myth about the Wyter, assign functions and get going?

If you used it, did you like it? Why? Why not?[/list:u]

Feel free to elaborate! I really want to hear your opinions about this.
Thank you!

All the best

[Moah]

I wanna planning to use it, but i got a bit lazy since i've had the session where everyone answered. I wanted to add a few value too, because one of or player is a maximizer and thought that helping others didn't made sense, since i kept track of the clan's riches, but not of the clan's good deeds.

[Nick Brooke]

The Clan Profile from Orlanth is Dead is a neat toy. However, I would very much like to hear people's opinion of its usefulness in actual play... Feel free to elaborate! I really want to hear your opinions about this.

Sorry to disappoint, but I've never used it in actual play. I have, however, hosted communal Clan Generation events at a couple of Gloranthan cons. You take a room of enthusiasts, split it down the middle into two "clans," read through the questionnaire, and take one answer to every question from each side of the room. I left any organisation up to the groups involved -- some of them quickly hit on a dynamic or an idiom, but generally mob rule prevailed. There were some real treats -- I particularly enjoyed one "whiny underlings" clan (Sandy Petersen led this effort), or the Earth-worshipping clan that liked cosying up to their rulers and then stabbing them in the back. At the end, your glamorous assistant helps tot up the scores, and the clans usually end by bickering about who'll come out on top after the imminent Hero Wars.

I think if you're going to use the questionnaire you should at least argue the toss for every option, rather than have the choices "rotate around the room" (or some such). I don't think having the Narrator decide everything by fiat would be a particularly good outcome, but certainly if you need to have the players' clan fit a certain role (a shrine, an alliance or enmity, a recent historical stance) there's no reason not to present this as a fait accompli.

These questionnaires are, IMO, a great way of presenting deep Gloranthan history to newcomers. I've several times toyed with the idea of converting my History of Malkionism into a "family history" questionnaire for Western players. And Kevin McDonald produced a beautiful one for Carmania at one point...

Cheers, Nick

[pete_darby]

Yes, I've used it for the Serenwyn game... leading to the creation of the honourable "hiding-behind-trees-and-throwing-rocks" clan.

Highly prized as scouts for warbands. Bloody useless in a stand up fight. Ended with an impressive Hate Lunars of 14W...

The questions were answered by the players, with me answering questions and filling in details where their Glorantha-fu was weak.

It certainly helped get a feel for the clan... we didn't have much idea of a character for the clan at the outset, and loooking at the finished sheet, it doesn't well convey the "feel" of the clan we got while creating it.

The most important clan feature, the secret of firewater, came about through character creation, frex.

I liked it, but I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, tools for setting creation.

[rylen dreskin]

I wanted to use a variant of it.  I thought I had some fellow student lined up here.  But I can't even get people to sit down and look at the system.  Now I'm sulking.  :<(

Anyhow, I prefer a number of the questions in the online clan generator to the Orlanth is Dead profile.  Paraphrasing questions, for instance I prefer "Were your people associated with Ernalda during the Green Age or w/ Orlanth when he rallied people to fight the Fire Tribe" to "which utensil do you more identify with."  (q1)

I'd like to know how the online generator decided ranked clan virtues and such.

Sorry I can't help more.  If I ever get a game started, I'll tell how clan generation goes.

Rylen

[Invain]

And Kevin McDonald produced a beautiful one for Carmania at one point...

Thanks for the complement, Nick! The Carmanian Noble House Generator is a bit dated now, and is also limited to bloodlines that trace back to Loskalm. I plan to fix this and other issues at some point, but haven't found the time so far.

Anyway, we did use the CNHG for my House Rhugandy game with mixed results. We found that if you went around the room asking questions, the responses lacked focus and the resulting House Profile was a tad bland. I don't know if this is true of the online Orlanthi clan generator.

Also, I didn't force them to answer any of the questions one way or the other to match my view of House Rhugandy's past - I just added information as needed. For example: my writeup for House Rhugandy plays up the "Lions" theme, so Durbadath was the big House deity. My players chose the "Humakt" answer to the relevant question in the CNHQ. I told them that both Humakt and Durbadath were popular House Rhugandy cults and left it at that.

Finally, although the players had fun answering the questions, we have yet to actually use the results in game! The players haven't referenced their CNHQ answers during play and I doubt they really remember what responses they gave. This is probably due to laziness on my part, and I plan to do something about it in the future.

~Kevin McD

[newsalor]

We did it and it was a wonderful way of introducing the background to the players. I think that we also got a feeling of belonging to a society while/after doing it.

[Peter Nordstrand]

Hi folks,

Sorry for taking so long to respond. And thank you for your replies. I appreciate it.

If presenting deep Gloranthan history to newcomers is a priority, then I have no doubt that the clan generator might be useful. Interestingly enough nobody mentions a single instance where the stuff generated has had any actual play signficance at all. It seems to be the general consensus that the generator is a great tool "to learn more about" or "get the feel of" Heortling myth & history. But then what? To me that is like writing up an extended, almost novel-like, character backstory for an "enter the dungeon, kill the monster & take its treasure" kind of game. If you like it, good for you, but it seems to have very little to do with what actually happens at the gaming table.

The most important clan feature, the secret of firewater, came about through character creation, frex.

Unless I misremember, this firewater secret has had quite an impact on your game. Isn't it funny that that the clan generator didn't oomph its way into your game like that?

Finally, although the players had fun answering the questions, we have yet to actually use the results in game! The players haven't referenced their CNHQ answers during play and I doubt they really remember what responses they gave. This is probably due to laziness on my part, and I plan to do something about it in the future.

Actually I'm not convinced that it is your fault. Here's my theory: As a roleplaying tool, the clan generator sucks! Narrators doesn't get any useful tips on how to use the generated clan in actual play (apart from the obvious ones). "OK, so we were friends with elves a thousand years ago. Cool! Let's start by playing the High Presure Front scenario from the rulesbook."

I'll be happy to elaborate if anybody is interested...


:-)

All the best,

[Nick Brooke]

Actually I'm not convinced that it is your fault. Here's my theory: As a roleplaying tool, the clan generator sucks! Narrators doesn't get any useful tips on how to use the generated clan in actual play (apart from the obvious ones). "OK, so we were friends with elves a thousand years ago. Cool! Let's start by playing the High Presure Front scenario from the rulesbook."

I'll be happy to elaborate if anybody is interested...

I'm always interested in your views; I suspect I may share them, given the current implementation of the clan generator. Care to elucidate?

Cheers, Nick

[Invain]

I'll be happy to elaborate if anybody is interested...

I'm always interested in your views; I suspect I may share them, given the current implementation of the clan generator. Care to elucidate?

I agree! The discussion would be interesting and useful, I think.

Here are my thoughts:

1) The community questionnaire should be short and colorful. Otherwise, the players won't remember (or care) what answers they gave, and this makes it much less useful.  The twenty questions I used is more than twice as long as it should be, I am afraid.

2) All of the questions and answers should have immediate relevance. The older an event is, the more historically/mythically potent it should be - otherwise, why waste the player's time? Most questions should focus on recent events. Save ancient history for when questions arise in through the story.

3) Use immediately! Don't save the results for later use. Don't put them aside and run a generic adventure. Instead, use the information to run a series of episodes that establish the setting.

What do you think? Any other suggestions?

~Kevin McD

[Peter Nordstrand]

The generator isn't really integrated in the game at all. Hero Wars Narrator's Book suggested giving the heroes community a number of ratings in things like Wealth, Morale, and Magic (the online clan generator actually generates values for these things). The generator in Orlanth is Dead gives no such stats, and provides few if any hints on how to use the result in actual play.

Triggered Episodes
These episodes are randomly triggered crises which strike the heroes or their communities.

(snip)

You should select three or four factors which affect the heroes' lives and are only partially subject to their control. This is easiest to do if the heroes belong to a community or organization whose fortunes they are willing to defend. The standard factors are a community's wealth, vulnerability to outside threats, morale, and its relationship to the Other World

(snip)

Assign a target number to each factor [Wealth, Morale, Threat, and Magic; PN]

(snip)

Every time you reach a natural break in your storyline, make a simple test for each of the four ratings against a resistance of 10. If the community fails one of these tests, a crisis episode occurs. The crisis relates to the failed test.

More later...

[RaconteurX]

I used the original Clan Generator three times, once for each of my two Hero Wars playtest campaigns and again for my (sadly) aborted Lonisi campaign. I outlined a series of "historical vignettes", based on my Lonisi material, which I intended to use to both teach my players the game rules and familiarize them with the setting and their clan. While I never ran the scenarios for my Lonisi group (it disintegrated due to scheduling, life and work changes amongst the various members, all at about the same time), they did make a terrific series of convention scenarios.

I was impressed by the incredible variety of differing clans possible using the Clan Generator, and all the results gave me an immense quantity of handy seeds from which to develop clan-focussed scenarios. The original Clan Generator was meant to be a great tool for the narrator, who could use it for everything from major campaign themes (using a clan's Values or Goals) to instant scenario ideas (using the Magic, Morale, Threat and Wealth scores to determine what sort of clan crisis the heroes must face in the current game session).

The version that saw publication was, sadly, missing much of the general utility in favor of specific questions directed toward later scenarios in the overall Sartar Rising story arc. It still has some great material in it, although Issaries should perhaps include such things in the main culture books in the future. The Clan Generator would have been much handier for newcomers, in my opinion, as a part of Thunder Rebels.

[Tim Ellis]

I agree! The discussion would be interesting and useful, I think.

Here are my thoughts:

1) The community questionnaire should be short and colorful. Otherwise, the players won't remember (or care) what answers they gave, and this makes it much less useful.  The twenty questions I used is more than twice as long as it should be, I am afraid.

Or at least, it should be broken down into a series of shorter "sub questionnaires" so that any one session does not seem to concentrate to much on the questionnaire - especially if that's not the players primary interest!

2) All of the questions and answers should have immediate relevance. The older an event is, the more historically/mythically potent it should be - otherwise, why waste the player's time? Most questions should focus on recent events. Save ancient history for when questions arise in through the story.

3) Use immediately! Don't save the results for later use. Don't put them aside and run a generic adventure. Instead, use the information to run a series of episodes that establish the setting.

Those two are, I think, sort of interlinked.  It struck me that one way to deal with this sort of problem would be to set up some skeletal events - a raid, a plea for help, a mysterious visitor, leaving the exact nature of the protagonist blank, but capable of being filled by a representative of each of the possible answers on the quetionnaire.  You might need to improvise details, of course (either that or you do a lot of preparation and have your next half dozen campaigns planned out!

[keithn]

I think I can share my experiences on the clan generator as I really did not think it was a good idea, gamewise, when I first heard of it. However, it ahs produced some good fun.

1) first experience was a Nick Brooke orchestrated shout and yell mob action. I think I was a Lunar appeaser of some sort but it worked as a method of rabble rousing.

2) second experience was really a solitary one where I enjoyed myself immensely trying to put together a Praxian one that made some sort of sense. I think I got the questions and answers OK but the result in terms of numbers etc, was a bit off. Anyway, good fun

3) I might have the order wrong here, but number three as far as memory goes was a Balazar version for a KoDP style email game set in Votankiland. For this I basically used the text from the history of Balazar and inserted a few options. It was remarkably easy to generate both questions and answers. The questions were posed as Yahoo groups polls, which again was an easy way of getting player votes on things. What I had hoped for from this process though was more of an argument from the players about what to go for. I decided that to make it properly fun I needed a gamist mechanic to make players have to argue, or deal with each other.

4)  In between I took part in a FTF round the table players choose the option while narrator looks up result. This was deadly dull - nobody had much of an opinion on anything, just picking what they thougth was least exciting or contradictory. The whole thing wasn't framed very well either

5)  My favourite attempt, the players took on the roles of faction leaders (earth priestess, elmal priest, elmal chief) with various agendas. The setting was the clan moot, the scene was where the three elders discussed the "real" history of the clan. Each had certain things that they wanted to prove or highlight, with varying degrees of "victory" allocated to each "question". Basically I gave them an answer to each question that they needed to argue for - but in the form of a riddle. The characters had abilities ("persuade", "charming". etc. ) and  each "round" consisted of a number of actions (mostly simple contests) against each other. OK - I know this sounds incredibly gamist and it was, but it was in-character fun with a bit of negotiation and colour added. If I were to recommend a method of running this "scenario" it would be as a competitive game where the players have somewhat opposing goals. It is needed to get players interested in not just the results at the end, the "hate lunar" number but in the perspective of that history, who is "using" that history and why the people believe what they believe. I would certainly use it again in an email game set up.

[Mandacaru]

Having been in Keith's Citadel King of Balazar use of this, I decided to go with something along these lines in the game I've just set up (both on Y!G). Here, though, the heroes are exiles from a clan in Far Point, and we are almost done with recounting the events of the last year which led to their exile. The format is simply: (1) elder recounts events of the season in question, (2) heroes say what they did (individually), which varies from contesting the event (e.g. resisting a mass Uroxi rape) to opting out (e.g. going fishing or a-courting), (3) they get an ability based on what they did, of as little obvious use as possible.

It is therefore very group-specific and recent and has served to get a slew of NPC's and plot hooks, flesh out the heroes, link them and get them talking, and provide some coherency to their background. Also some pretty fun writing by the players. It is also something to do while "character sheets" get sorted.

The disadvantages are that there are a couple of seasons too many in Glorantha and the players have so far been unable to alter the course of events in major ways - there are implicit big pointy arrows. But, those are by the by and I'd probably run through something like this for a FTF game as well.

Sam.