[Shangri-la] An attempt to overview

[Lxndr]

Shangri-la has gone quite a bizarre and remarkable distance from its first manifestation as a simple FUDGE rip.  The die system I am planning to use can be found here:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8578

Shangri-la evolved from my pre-Forge brainstorming about a game that would specifically be designed to handle a situation where players came and left through a revolving door.  Sort of a "saturday, anyone who shows can show, and somehow the stories will keep going on."

The basic concept:  you are dreamers who have managed to transcend your own mind, and have discovered something much more.  There's a world just outside everyone's personal dreamscape, a multilayered tapestry woven from everyone's dreams.  It's strongest at night, under the moonlight, when many people are sleeping, but even in the day people's dreams lurk in the back of their minds.

A person's dreamscape is their own - you can never enter it for any reason.  Shangri-la is not about exploring the dreams of others, but wandering through the worlds the dreams of mankind have created.

Every session of Shangri-la starts with the available characters walking out of their heads, so to speak, and always ends with them waking up.  Any non-dream-world stuff I might have would be between-session stuff.  I am adamant about this - no directly affecting the real world.  The game's about wandering through the dreams of mankind.

The dreamworld is segregated into numerous dream-realms.  Just outside the mind is the "Funhouse", a twisted reflection of the real world.  In the Funhouse are the ways to get to the more distant dreams.  Each dream-realm has its own laws, and thus requires its own skill, so to speak, to learn.  These skills default off one another depending on their "distance" from one another.  (Any realm that can be reached directly from the Funhouse defaults at a distance of 1, for instance).

In the deepest, farthest reaches of the dreamworld, in the most alien of realms, lie the dream-lords, who constantly attempt to manipulate the world for the worse - and work against each other, or ally with one another.  Some dreamers work to better the world, against the dream-lords.  Some just escape into dreams, finding there all the things that they are denied in the real world.  And some even choose to work for these dream-lords, for whatever purpose.

In the current incarnation of Shangri-la, dreamers are mainly defined through threads and knots.  Both are metaphorical images wrought with meaning, and as the dreamer wanders through the dreamscape, these images and situations manifest.  Those which are knots work as penalties when acting against them; those which are threads work as bonuses when acting for them.  Yes, something can be both a knot and a thread.  Realms also have knots and threads, which help define what the realm itself is about.

A character may have as many knots as he desires, but only ever has one thread by himself.  Dreamers must start out at this state - dreamers tend to be those who are "hanging by a thread", the sort of people who are so desperate because they can't change anything in the real world, that they find themselves escaping here.

Other threads come from connections in the real world, connections made while wandering the tapestry and interacting with the bits of dreams of people who are close to you, even if you've never met them.  There's gonna be some sort of relationship tree.  Each person has only one thread that defines them, but by connecting to other people, you can carry their threads around with you.  

I have no idea, right now, how this whole part is going to work, 'cause I came up with it just in the last week.  But I want to relate it to the "dream lords making everything worse" above, so both games could play out on the same page.

The dice, you see in the other thread.  The way I currently have it working is:  you roll 1 die, trying to get 3 successes.  If your skill is positive, you add that many dice to that base 1 die (skill 1 = 2 dice).  If your skill is negative, you still roll one die, and the success # increases (skill -1 = 4 successes).  Threads and knots affect the # of successes needed as well.  Threads reduce, knots increase.

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Earlier versions of Shangri-la had attributes (6, then 3, then none) - threads came about around the time of 3 attributes, just before I dropped them.  After dropping the attribute, for a while I said "all dreamers have a quest to complete" and, while that sounds cool, I'm not sure if I want it in the final game.

Anyway, that's the picture of Shangri-la as it looks right now.

[Jonathan Walton]

There are a few issues with dreamworld games that I'd love to see someone finally resolve or find a way of dealing with.  Every dream setting that I've encountered, from Nightbane's Dreamstream (in Between the Shadows) to In Nomine's the Marches (in the book of the same title and the Ethereal Player's Guide) to Dreamwalker, demands a constant stream of active creativity from the players (or, in many cases, just the GM) to keep the dreamworld constantly moving and changing in the fluid way that dreams do.  There should be a way of systematically supporting this kind of thing, based on associations with certain themes or images or whatever, that would allow players to focus their attentions on something besides how the world is constantly shifting.  In most dreamworld games, you spend so much time and description reinforcing the shared imaginary space, to make sure everyone is imagining the fluid changing dreamscape, that you can spend little time on something else.

One way around this might be to not worry that everyone is imagining the dreamscape changing in the same way, which seems to be the goal of other games.  Instead, you might think about giving individual players responsibility for subjectively imagining the fluid world.  Then, if a particular character wants to interact with part of the dreamworld that they are imagining, they could say, "I'm going to grab the shovel from the two-headed farmer," and everyone would know simply to incorperate a two-headed farmer into their personal imaginings.  This might also help reinforce the subjective nature of dreams.

Again, I don't know tons about Shangri-la or your intentions for it, I was just offering a warning based on the weaknesses of similar games.

[Lxndr]

Well, with Shangri-la I've tried to come up with a few things to address the fluidity of dreams, in varying ways.  Obviously as the game is in the alpha stage I don't know for sure how effective my attempts are, but I have given it thought.

First, the dreamworld of th egame, the Shangri-la that's composed of so many sub-realms, is the sum total of many different dreams from many different dreamers, so there's some semblance of, if not stability, at least gathering around a given statistical mean that pulls in different directions as people sleep, wake, and dream.  So there's the fantastical, and I certainly expect things to be fluid, but I don't expect things - especially at the "lower" levels closest to "Earth" - to be quite as frenetically surreal as individual dreams often are.  And characters don't get to enter other dreams - they're the ones who've left their own dreams to find something greater.

To use a metaphor, think of each person and animal as a mountain spring.  When they're asleep, it flows, when they're awake, it trickles, and when they actually dream, it roars.  The dream realm is the combination of those tributaries into an actual river.  Nearest the dreamers (i.e. in the Funhouse) the flow is still erratic, the waters shallow and muddy.  As one travels down the river (i.e. to realms farther away from the Funhouse, and thus Earth/the waking world), the waters grow deeper, and the current more rapid.

The second are the threads and knots, which are the focus of character and realm definition.  Each thread and knot is defined as a metaphor/theme/image.  Dreamers carry these around as they travel through the dreamworld because they are woven into their selves, and these things manifest around them, not always positively.  Dream-realms also have threads and knots to define them, which are recurring images within the realm itself.  So by defining the threads/knots that a character has, or has access to, and combining that with the threads/knots of the dream-realms (and of appropriate NPCs), I hope to have a combination of fluidity and continuity, as well as a basis to build the other surrealities the characters will most certainly come across.  (And also as a sign that a particular dreamer might be close by).

I'm also pondering adding a third set of thread/knot definition - a situational, session-based set.  The GM would go "here's the stuff that's recurrent across the dreamworld TONIGHT."  Each session it'd be something new.  Or perhaps do it round-robin style, each player (including the GM) suggesting one situational thing.  Would have to work out mechanics for that, but now that I've said it aloud, I think I'll be adding it to the game.

As for subjective imagining, and players randomly adding stuff like two-headed farmers?  I'm not against players doing that sort of weirdness in Shangri-la and will happily encourage it in the final text, I'm sure.  The rule there would basically be "that which exists, is allowed."

How's that for a start?