The Kap - A premise too far?

[Mike Holmes]

Steady on Mike - I'm supposed to be working on this thing, not you!!!

Not work. I enjoy speculating out loud. I just hope that something ends up being useful.

That's a lot to chew on. Combining lots of historical periods into one semi-ficticious era is a very good idea. That is one way for me to get everything in that I want.

And it plays off all the radical theories that people have about the sphinx being twelve thousand years old, and whatnot. Archaeology is, after all, an imperfect science. You'd be surprised what passes for "evidence" when there is so little to be had. The picture changes constantly (have you read anything recently about the ancient Amazon civilization). So, I can't imagine anyone having problems with such a mish-mosh; obviously it's not historical, It's got working magic.

And peppering the setting with narrativist links is a good idea too, although not something I've done before.  So essentially, these places/situations are merely catalysts for personal elements that the player characters bring along with them?? On their own they may not be of any use, they 'come alve' when integrated with the personality, backstory and motivations of characters. Is this right? Sort of like Alexander the Great and his revelatory trip to the Siwa Oasis (he came away convinced he was the son of Zeus Ammon...).

Exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of. Enable the players to tell stories about their characters using the setting as a catalyst. But keep in mind the juxtaposition concept. Perhaps places can take from those visiting as well. All depends on where you finally come down on the actual Premise. Which dilemma do you prefer?

Mike

P.S. My son's name is Alexander. I'm a big fan of the Ptolmaic era. :-)

[contracycle]

historical syncretic vision. So, include everything you know from all eras. Have an upper, middle, and lower kingdom for conflict (perhaps each with a Kap, or maybe only one). Have this fictitious Egypt be bordered or have relations with by Kush, Ethiopia, the Chaldea, Assyria, Sumeria, Rome, Carthage, other ancient African, Mid-Eastern, and European countries.

Aaaaaaaaaarg!!!  Then what makes it different from any other, dime-a-dozen, anachronistic, screw-consistency-I-want-the-short-term-reward piece of rubbish on the shelves?

[contracycle]

civilization). So, I can't imagine anyone having problems with such a mish-mosh; obviously it's not historical, It's got working magic.

But that, uinasmuch as it describes the psychology of the people, IS accurate.

Exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of. Enable the players to tell stories about their characters using the setting as a catalyst. But keep in mind

And how do we communicate the setting to them?  If the player is expected to create something approipriate, in the speficied frame, they must have significant prior knowledge of the contents of this world.  So what do we do, give them Egyptology homework?

[Tim Gray]

"Dear Mr H Imhotep, you have secured a place..."  Delivered by an ibis.


As to why heroes are so often outcasts and misfits, I suspect it's because that's the Great American Hero - or one of the main types, at least. Individual being greater than establishment and all that.

[contracycle]

...uh, yeah, whatever.

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."

— Alexis de Tocqueville

http://www.rom.on.ca/egypt/case/society/who.html

This is a kinda "who's who" of known figures in the Old Kingdom.  The details are pretty sparse so they could be used with a lot of freedom, I think.  Rest of the site is worth a browse.

[Mike Holmes]

Gareth, assuming that there is some sort of glut of overproduction of games that mangle history twisting together all of the facts of certain periods, what would you suggest as a solution? Go with historical? As if that hasn't been done to death as well? Ars Magica did about as good a job as you can do with the whole historical, but with magic, concept that I can imagine. And I'm just advocating that Paul produce what I'd like to see. Obviously you don't want tho see this. Oh, well. I don't believe that you can come up with an argument for one setting being better than the other a priori.

I also see a difference between a system that emulates a society that believes in magic and one that actually has magic. IIRC, you've argued against this in the past, so we may have to agree to disagree here. Again, I'm just arguing for what I'd like to see, or how I'd do it.

As for where the players would get the information from, you didn't read closely enough. I'm suggesting that the text of the game provide as much information on the setting as possible. The player should have to come up with none of that. The GM I suppose can create new places if he likes to, but what I'd like to see, optimally, is enough stuff in the text to play several entire games without ever having to make something up.

What the players would make up would be their character's reaction to the significance of the places visited. When I say reaction, I include the idea of whole mini-plots, or anything else the player wants to come up with while at the sites. Perhaps he sould discuss it with the GM, or perhaps he should be given some directorial power, I don't know. Just some method by which the player can create an appropriate bit of story that relates to the places the characters visit.

So, no homework, just some thought about the character as pertains to ideas provided by places visited, as provided by the GM (who gets them from the text). You could do this historically if you wanted by doing the research as GM and disincluding "unrealistically" co-located stuff. If Paul wanted to be really generous, he could give time frames for the GM on each location so that the GM could incorporate them in a fashion that corresponds to history, and the GM could run in ehatever time he wanted.

But that's not the premise of this game as I see it (of course Paul will have to decide that in the end). I see the Premise having to do with the majesty of gargantuan monuments inspiring heroes to great heights and the like. This could be done entirely in a fantasy setting, I suppose, but the advantage of using real world sites is to tap into whatever real world knowledge the players have to make them seem more majestic. And for source material for Paul to write from.

I often find that the monumnets of the real world are much more impressive than those in fantasy worlds, often due to their actual scale, if not the context of them having been constructed by real people. Consider the Great Wall of China. It's estimated that as many as a million people worked on that project at a time. That's just staggering.

If you want to write a game that focused on how the progress of actual history impacts the characters, I can see that being done, if done very carefully. If Paul goes with my concept, here, that leaves you free to make that game yourself, Gareth (heck, I'd probably help you write it if you'd let me). OTOH, maybe he'll be persuaded by your desire to have a historically accurate game. Paul?

Mike

[Mike Holmes]

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."

Um, sure, quote a French aristocrat who was essentially commenting on British society in the New World in the early nineteenth century. That's relevant. I believe that Tim was merely trying to point out why a certain stereotypical hero is portrayed so often. I doubt he was commenting on it's validity, anyhow.

Good Egypt info on that link, though.

Mike

[contracycle]

Intersting site covering Memphis, tho not deeply:
http://touregypt.net/featurestories/memphis.htm

Tales of Egyptian magic:
http://touregypt.net/featurestories/magic.htm

Includes: "Pressing the magician further, Djed-djedi told the pharaoh that it could only be brought to him by the eldest of the triplets, who were still in the belly of Raddjedet, wife of a wab priest of Ra. These children, the magician prophesied, would inherit the kingship of the land of Egypt."

An article on offerings procedure and the dead:
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/offering.htm

An interesting page which compares the construction of the pyamids to an Amnish barn-raising and takes a stabe at their social impact.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/explore/builders.html

This looks interesting:
http://www.sis.gov.eg/pharo/html/front.htm

[contracycle]

point out why a certain stereotypical hero is portrayed so often. I doubt he was commenting on it's validity, anyhow.

I don't think it is portrayed often, really - most American heroes, I think, come with all sorts of social validity - being Hollywood-beautiful being among their chief features.  I am continually fascinated by the huge gulf that lies between America's perception of itself and everyone elses, is all.

[contracycle]

Mike,

What concerns me is much the kind of thing you mention, where the monuments in the RW are often more impressive than their fantasy equivalents.  There's quite a lot of international traffic in this period, probably greek or minoan raiders, phoenicians, the hyksos and sundry other desert tribes, etc etc.  I think we often introduce these aspects of "variety" because we don;t understand how varied historical cultures were.  I don't mean a strict adherence to every historical detail, though, partly because this is manifestly implausible.  But on the other hand history offers an Other World that is infinitely realised; we can find so much that frankly we would never have been able, even had the time, to imagine.

One of the links I posted above discusses the raising of the pyramids in terms of the effect - socialising, enculturating - that the sheer physical process of construction would probably have had.  When we do funky aliens from space stuff or magic to make such majestic architecture. It loses its impact, becomes just another technology.  It would be inteersting, for example, to do a game sprread across the contsruction of a pyramid, the construction itself perhaps serving as a metaphor for time and growth in the backdrop.  Lots of interesting ways to get good effects out of this sort of thing, I feel, without muddying the waters.  In that regard, I would be much more interested in a serious attempt at a historical work than trying to produce another all-things-to-everyone setting.  Personal preference.

[Mithras]

Thanks for the links contracycle, all useful stuff.

My stand-point: I'd love to do a serious, gritty historical RPG set in a very very focussed and 'closed system' representation of Old Kingdom Egypt. No flashy magic, but it works (invisibly). The world is both small and large (spiritually and monumentally, not geographically...).  

But does anyone want to play such a game? I believe such hard-ass histories are best run as short campaigns, where the characters can be almost pre-generated by the GM to mesh well with the setting and the themes being explored.  I've run such games (infrequently) but always find that 'nifties' of one sort or another are way more popular with my players (and seemingly everyone elses).

So what to do? I appreciate Mike's idea of 'including all the best bits' and it IS something I tried with ZENOBIA and an earlier incarnation of a bronze age game that I've worked on. For this game, however, I want to go for an equivalence of historicity. It must feel like a single world, a closed system where everything makes sense and the borders of the world seem to stop on the edge of the desert.

So fictionalizing aspects of the setting is the way I will be going. Drawing from earlier and later periods, but piling it up to create a 200% Egyptian experience, multi-layered with texture as well as meaning and theme. Magic is a good way to do this, but not something I will overdo.

I'm going to seriously play down non-Egyptians. To the Nile Valley occupants they were barely human, playing no part in the scheme of things.  

One final thing - I do love Egyptian culture. I've got a huge library on the subject and studied it intently for 5 years (even going as far as to write a fifth of a book on Egyptian religion). And I went there in 1996 (yay!!).

BTW: using the building of a pyramid as a campaign metaphor is a wonderful idea. The Egyptians were very clued in to that way of thinking, everything resonated with other aspects of life and existence. Everything was a metaphor for something else. A lovely idea!

[Epoch]

point out why a certain stereotypical hero is portrayed so often. I doubt he was commenting on it's validity, anyhow.

I don't think it is portrayed often, really - most American heroes, I think, come with all sorts of social validity - being Hollywood-beautiful being among their chief features.  I am continually fascinated by the huge gulf that lies between America's perception of itself and everyone elses, is all.

This is your second unprovoked attempt to draw an interesting thread into Permenant Floating Internet Flamewar #63.  Please stop.  Or at least do it in some other thread.

My stand-point: I'd love to do a serious, gritty historical RPG set in a very very focussed and 'closed system' representation of Old Kingdom Egypt. No flashy magic, but it works (invisibly). The world is both small and large (spiritually and monumentally, not geographically...).

But does anyone want to play such a game? I believe such hard-ass histories are best run as short campaigns, where the characters can be almost pre-generated by the GM to mesh well with the setting and the themes being explored. I've run such games (infrequently) but always find that 'nifties' of one sort or another are way more popular with my players (and seemingly everyone elses).

Well, my viewpoint is almost totally valueless, considering how far I am from any audience niche that I'm aware of, but I could take a theoretical "Kap RPG" in two ways:

1.  "Mythic Egypt."  It makes a mishmash of history precisely by following late Egyptian myths about early egypt.  So it's a-historical but it's not a Rokugan -- not an ethnic flavoured fantasy world.  I don't know much about Egypt, so I can't give you concrete examples of what this would be like, but my conception is take what the Chinese thought of the Han dynasty during the T'ang dynasty -- and suppose that that was what it was actually like back then.

2.  "Mostly Realistic."  Conspiracy-theory history of Egypt.  Historical, plus the stuff that the Kap supressed so that it never had a chance to make it into our history books.

Both would require copious background material, I'm afraid.  Heck, even Rokugan requires copious background material.

[Mike Holmes]

Well, my viewpoint is almost totally valueless, considering how far I am from any audience niche that I'm aware of, ...

Well, we are at least a niche of two. What you described is very much what I personally envisioned (I especially like your "mythic" concept). I think there are probably some other gamers out there who feel similarly.  ;-)

Not to say that I can't see doing a game like Gareth describes. I like the idea of a historical game of pyramid building, with the pyramid a metaphor of social climbing. That has a lot of potential.

I'd like to see both.

Mike

[contracycle]

This is your second unprovoked attempt to draw an interesting thread into Permenant Floating Internet Flamewar #63.  Please stop.  Or at least do it in some other thread.

I have been thinking about this disturbing slander for a couple of days.  I'm afraid I see no requirement to claim to see the Emperors New Clothes on this 'board; I was not aware that being an American patriot was a requirement of being a poster.  If this is indeed the case you'll have to bar me.

[contracycle]

Interesting article over here

http://www.eclipse-chasers.com/akhet.html

detailing a theory that the "horizon" in Egyptian mythology is in fact a reference to an eclipse.  Interesting stuff but way over my head; v. interesting argument over the role of stelae as references to the "limbs" of the moon during an eclipse.