[long] Indiana Jones and the Antitower of Euthomios Kopris

[Eero Tuovinen]

I don't usually write these actual play posts here, mainly because I tend to be quite independent in my rpg work - unless it's to help somebody else, I rarely find reason to reach out.

However, this time I thought to make an exception; I'm currently running the third year of a classical fantasy campaign - rules based on D&D, world a fantasy mix of archaic and classical era Greece - and I have a habit of writing play accounts of the game for the group. We have a highly variable amount of players, and although sessions are set up every week, not nearly everyone comes to every session. This is an attitude I encourage - the idea is to keep the game freewheeling enough to just run with who comes. Lately I've run the game for two groups, to make room for all interested players. Due to this set-up it's useful to keep everyone apprised of what's going on in the campaign. Thus I write every session up after the game.

Anyway, I decided to write this session description in English for a change and post it here in Forge, where both forgites and my players can get at it. I'll concentrate less on the details and more on the theory of the game, so it'll be educative for the players as well. Also, I've been thinking on what Ron's said lately about the importance of actual play reports, and wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Getting to know people through their play and all that.

Before I start, I should note that the rules system is a rewrite of d20, streamlined into something between Heroquest and Tunnels & Trolls. I'm currently in the process of writing it up for the Finnish audience. My fantasy heartbreaker, if you will. The game world is roughly equal to historic Greece after the first Athenian league, with a heavy smattering of fantasy elements. I will refer to things by their historical names here, instead of the names they have in the campaign, to make this more readily understandable; we use made up names for geography and historical personages in the game to limit any pedantry about real historic facts.

But now, the session: we started the season of play just a couple of weeks ago, but the new group has clicked like never before. Most of the players play in the weekday group, there's only three players and me on the weekend run. Consequently play is much faster and more rounded; while the other group has mainly puttered and engaged in character play, the weekend folk have defined a campaign ark, executed some world-changing adventuring and addressed theme in spades.

The central meme of the group has since the first session been the Democratic League of Athens: the PCs swore grave oaths to each other to defend the democratic ideals, thus forming a "party". This is lately a requirement I've placed on the players; if they want party play, they have to work together to achieve it. I don't care one whit whether it happens or not.

Anyway, the characters had ample reason for it, and that even without much coordination. The characters are as follows:
Prince Kritherion: Modeled after the historical prince Dionysus of Syracuse, prince Kritherion was exiled by his father the tyrant. He came to Athens, and collected the Democratic League to his side to liberate Syracuse from his father's grasp. Obviously, he'd like to end up on top...
Theophilos: An Athenian philosopher and international political terrorist, who returned to Athens after a fiasco in Syracuse. He was scarred in wars against Sparta and brutalized by his comrades, when he had to fight against them to save his mentor Philocrates in Syracuse. Now he's passionately against monarchic rule anywhere, and prime material to be a hero - meaning, ready to wet his hands with the blood of innocents.
Gennadius: A citizen of Tarentum, his home town has been ravaged by an unknown ritual that summons a great behemoth, the Hornhead, every full moon to rampage through the city. Almost nothing is left, but Gennadius, a natural philosopher and mage, has sworn revenge; inspired by his teacher Archimedes he wants to discover the secret of gunpowder to destroy the beast.
Eskalides: A mage from the western coasts, belonging to the Conspiracy of Silence, a magical society sworn to keep dangerous secrets out of unworthy hands. He was drawn into the events when he found out the goals of the Democratic League - to find gunpowder and use it in a revolution.
Other characters include Spartan officers, Athenian scouts, dwarven captains and such. We play currently in near troupe style, with the players switching characters when appropriate, everybody running multiple ones, some times on different sides of the same conflict. I'm very proud of these guys: when we started over two years ago they'd never even heard of narration sharing.

The first three characters were drawn together in the first session, and swore to liberate Syracuse from the tyrant and Tarentum from the behemoth in the name of the democratic ideal. In the Academy of Athens, a legendary school and library, they also discovered the legend of the Antitower, a relic of the great magician Euthomios Kopris. They had indication that the tower would reveal inside the secret of gunpowder, if it could ever be found. Consequently Gennadius and Theophilos in a feverish bout of calculation and astronomy pored over the old records and located the tower in the wilderness of western coast of Greece.

I should explain that in the game world magic as a concept is reserved for anything and everything done through ritual means, including mechanical marvels as well as stuff like symphatetic magic. Meanwhile spiritual magic is called "sorcery", and is a quite separate thing. On the other hand, nothing much separates a philosopher and a mage except area of focus and social status.

Anyway, in the first session the two philosophers made a deal with the dwarves of Athens (a jew-like subcommunity with it's own agenda) for funding an exploration to the Antitower. Meanwhile prince Kritherion maneuvered himself into the expeditionary army of Athens, going to support Thebes against an unknown enemy. The plan was for the prince to supply the army and political clout while the philosophers-cum-archeologists would uncover the gunpowder they needed.

The second session was our rendition of the Athenian expedition. A military genius was born, a road pissing off the old pelasgian gods built, a war with Sparta averted, and prince Kritherion sent to hide with the Lakedaimonians after trying to usurp the strategos of the army. Thebes stayed an ally of Athens. A grand old time, to be sure.

Now, the ground was set for the session I'm going to tell about. Welcome to...
Indiana Jones
and the Antitower of Euthomios Kopris

The expedition was racing for gunpowder. The foolish philosophers chose to trust the dwarves, who felt no loyalty towards the ivory tower intellectuals they needed to find the tower. Unknown to them, prince Kritherion had revealed the secret of gunpowder to the Spartans in exhange for troops against the tyrant of Syracuse. Who would reach the tower first?

As I told the players at the start of the session, a good pulp archeological adventure needed three things: archeologists, nazis and freemasons or their equivalent (actually, I should instate a three-sided alignment system for the game...). The earlier sessions set us up nicely in this regard: prince Kritherion had betrayed his archeologist friends for the nazis, while the archeologists had hired an expert for the journey, unaware that he was a freemason. To solemnise the event I degreed a special rule: whenever the Indiana Jones theme was playing in the background, the characters would get +2 in any pulpy endeavours.

Anyway, at the start of the session we made Eskalides, a new character for a player who wasn't with us in the earlier sessions. Character creation in the modified system is quick, so we just settled on the character hook (the Conspiracy of Silence, invented on the spot) and got on with play. It wasn't unreasonable to assume that the philosophers would want an actual mage to accompany them, after all (they are two separate character classes in the system, so there's some benefit).

We also created a new character for the player of Kritherion, because we wanted to keep Kritherion and the Spartans out of the story at first, so they could come and surprise Indy at the opportune moment. We settled on the dwarf captain Turotsky, who would lead the expedition's dwarf contingent.

A note about the power relationships of the group: the fantasy context of the campaign and the previous experiences of the players more than assure that they won't be doing anything radical with shared narration or such, preferring to do what's expected and waiting passively for the GM to save them if it doesn't work. However, the chance is always there, and I engage the players frequently with various techniques, forcing them - sometimes quite roughly - to do things they aren't used to. Thus our general gameplay resembles pretty closely what you'd get in Sorcerer or Heroquest: pretty comprehensive rules without overt mechanics for player authorship, but plenty of ways for everybody to address premise. A piquant flavor is added by all the D&D assumptions and learned passivity the players take with them to the table.

Anyway, onwards: we had three players for the session, the player of Gennadios couldn't make it. That didn't stop the dynamics of the situation, so we went forth and started our expedition. Any sensible Athenian would take a ship when going to the west coast, but the players chose the adventorous route of dealing with the dwarves, who know routes through the central wilderness. A dozen dwarves with orders to find the gunpowder with extreme prejudice, three philosophers who didn't have a clue that the GM doesn't protect them from the dwarves just because they're hired help.

From the start of the journey the player of Turotsky emphasized the martial culture of the dwarves, taking all changes to rub the differences in for the academics (Heikki: don't know if you did it intentionally, but great play; remind me to give an additional experience point to Turotsky; so much more happened later on that I forgot after the game). The players of our philosophers and mages responded by ludicrous depictions of childish and clueless academic behaviour. I don't really know if they thought it inconceivable that the dwarf henchmen would become hostile, or if they trusted us to preserve character integrity even if they goaded an interesting conflict. I hope for the latter, but I don't think about that during the session; the players are free to assume what they will, and their characters will carry the consequences.

I should mention that the dwarves in the world are split in different cultures, but that the one in Greece is near identical to the D&D dwarf. The greatest difference is that they are a desperate minority huddled in their own districts in the poleis, plotting death to the orc barbarians who drove them from their mountain home. Delightfully political and paranoid.

Anyway, there would have to be some events on the journey. A long while ago I came to consider the mandatory journey encounters a chore in the fantasy game; you cannot really skip it all, as the distances have to be impressed in some way. On the other hand, the basic D&D way of using random battles is simply odious. Since this fall I've added a new tool to my repertoire in this regard: in the rules the characters have in addition to feats other classes of extraneous attributes, including stuff like character motivations, relationships, enemies and so on (I claim independent invention of both relationship and soul attributes for my game ;). The characters are effectively mapped into a limited number of rules nodes, and the rules I employ are ultra-strict in application: if something isn't defined as a sidelevel (as the feats and other definitors are called), it won't have impact in the rules. Does wonders for players' rules involvement.

So, to handle the journeying inherent in fantasy adventures I'm developing a method of drawing random encounter tables out of the characters. Later on I'll add other means of defining the journey (poetic interludes and such), but currently the idea is simple: a table is filled out of the sidelevels of the characters, and it's used as an oracle to find out how the journey gets messed up. I usually find one roll enough per journey from A to B, but one never knows.

So, I rolled on the Table of Adventure, as it's called, and came up with the cult of the Hornhead, an enemy of Gennadios the philosopher. They hate Gennadios without mercy because he's worked for years against them in Tarentum. Now my job was to improvise an encounter involving this relationship. The idea in this random encounter table is that because the players make it, conseivably the table will include stuff relevant to their characters. The table works to make all private issues of the characters issues for all characters, because the odds are that characters won't face their own contributions, but instead something another player added to the table. In the long run the characters will get all twisted together, as they face the same memes.

Anyway, the encounter. In the middle Greece there still lives tribes of the Pelasgians, the original inhabitants of the peninsula. The expedition had the bad luck to stumble on a cult practice of a splinter sect of the pelasgians: these wild men didn't worship the Ktonic gods like their peers, but instead revered the Hornhead behemoth, which had passed through the area a hundred years ago. They still kept the big parasitic insects (carrion crawlers, incidentally) habiting the monster's skin as cult animals.

So, the expedition stumbled on some carrion crawlers. This is normally an extremely hazardous situation in this game, as I give not one whit about whether the characters die or not. Consequently the monsters they face tend to be grossly overpowered compared to the characters. What's better, my rules mods mean that only characters with fighter levels actually know how to conduct a fight. So there.

However, in this case the party had a dozen extremely armored and disciplined dwarves, so the confrontation with the crawlers was just a formality. I've developed applications of HQ-style short and long conflicts for the game, so I can afford battles for color reasons. After a couple of minutes the characters were ready to continue their journey.

Meanwhile, the social situation of the expedition continued to deteriorate. The philosophers were oblivious to how much they grated the dwarves, even when they were tied up during the fight, to stop them from doing something stupid. I drove the dwarf captain's player without mercy, letting the NPC dwarves suggest all kinds of practical and sensible solutions for those loud and offensive "philosophers". We had some nice roleplaying moments when the dwarves expected their leader to appear decisive and wise, while the phisophers flouted authority again and again.

Things came to a head when the pelasgians came for restitution. Their cult animals were slaughtered without reason (they were just hunting near the trail, after all), and they wouldn't let the dwarves go without making reparation. Problem was, the dwarves hadly had anything of use to the barbarians. The NPC dwarves were quite ready to give the philosophers as slaves to repair the relations; the dwarven mines and secret encampments in the forest would be in trouble if the pelasgians were pissed off. The players or character did not have an inkling about how important these cultist were to their tribe (outcasts, in truth, but nobody had enough experience with them to know this).

Well, after a whole night of being threatened by pelasgian arrows (they're the typical forest ninjas you get in fantasy) the dwarves accepted the offer of the pelasgians: they would forego further demands if the dwarves would attack and decimate a pelasgian village nearby for them. The cultists were all from that village, you see, and wanted revenge. Evil, evil things, but glib. They got the dwarves to believe that it was tribe war and there'd be no repercussions.

The situation was all in all quite impossible, which is what you get in this game. The only salvation for players tends to be that I accept almost anything at all they care to throw at me as long as it's fun and imaginative. It's really a kind of philosophical practice: turtle up and maximize your attack bonus in the futile hope of survival, or embrace the glorious adventure life. The former leads to certain death the minute you take me up on anything that just happens to be too tough on your character, while the latter might do the same, but at least the adventure will be heroic, and your character will be in the center of something important. For example, in this case there were all kinds of decisions the expedition could have done: if any one of them would have broken the formation in the night camp and escaped, I'd have had him meet the tribal lookout looking for the cultists, giving the dwarves an out. He'd have been a coward and traitor, but at least alive. Or if the captain had offered challenge to save his brethren, the cultist would certainly have accepted, giving the dwarf captain a chance at heroism. Instead they decided to play it safe, and agreed to the plan of the cultists.

The battle with the village was a short affair, as I implemented the long challenge mechanic instead of actual skirmish rules. The dwarves had some bad luck in their rolls, and the captain wasn't very inspired in his tactics, not garnering any bonuses for anything. Consequently the battle ended in the dwarves escaping for their lives, hardly a match for the long range weapons of the barbarians or their swift feet. (Heikki: remind me to add "Enemy: Ekmeyg tribe" to Turotsky; they don't know it was him who attacked, but the karma cannot be escaped...)

But that's not all; some hard words were said before the battle between the philosophers and dwarves, and while the latter fought and died, the former were again tied to trees some ways off. When the dwarves went for retreat and freed the philosophers, Theophilos and Eskalides chose to escape from the dwarves as well. Extremely hazardous, alone in the woods. Gennadios, on the other hand, stayed with the dwarves, being played by the GM who wanted the dwarves to have somebody who could take them to the Antitower later on.

Anyway, at this time we dropped the dwarves and went with the two daredevil philosophers, all alone in the woods. As first thing I explained to them that death by exposure wouldn't be happening, but that their characters could well perish through something more interesting if their forestry failed. We rolled some orientation rolls and decided that the characters were quite lost; the roll was a second degree failure. By the karmic law this would mean two different kinds of shit raining at them during the rest of their journey. There's no other consequence from getting lost, as it's not really that interesting to have nothing to do because you're stuck in a forest.

Anyway, to the Table of Adventure. I rolled twice for it and got by pure coincidence one each of both characters' issues: one was "Member of the Conspiracy of Silence" from Eskalides and the other "Enemy: Syracusian Democratic Front" from Thephilos. My job was to construe something interesting out of these. I work the adventure table entries as bangs; whatever it is, I twist to a situation that cannot be ignored. The players have never especially commented on this stuff, but it seems they like the tense narrativism as much as I do, despite trying to hide behind "my character would do this" from time to time. My usual response is "as if I care, do what you will". One and the same for me if the players want to rationalize their choices by their characters, which they themselves made in the first place.

I've found that the terminology of adventure, side adventure, subadventure and so on is useful for structuring the game. In this session we had consequently three side adventures: the pelasgian episode, and the two scenes that followed from the adventure rolls above. A side adventure need only last a scene to make it's point.

Anyway, the philosophers found their way out of the woods and stumbled on a laboratory of a hermit mage. These are a common sight at west coast, but whether dangerous or not, one couldn't know. Eskalides was quick to spot the secret mark of the Conspiracy of Silence above the door, knowing that this was the laboratory of one of his coconspirators. Obviously the famished and ravaged travellers tried for hospitality.

The mage Miliates, when he heard their story, was most anxious to help. He furnished them with homunculi laborers for their archeological dig, and enough money to hire a boat to take them to the tower. Of course, he also drugged Theophilos with hypnotic drugs and instructed Eskalides to destroy the tower rather than letting Academy, Sparta or the dwarves get it. He wasn't bloodthirsty per se, but if the hypnotic suggestion would fail when the time came, Eskalides should eliminate Theophilos rather than let him go knowing where the tower was.

Miliates was quite a personality himself, as mages tend to be in this game. The nature of magic makes it quite interesting to play with, here. There's no dull fireballs or such, but rather astounding feats of science gone wrong, like some steampunk thing. His "semidwarves", as he called them, were prodigiously strong homunculi his late wife had constructed, as an example of the magic in this game.

The second hazard came right after, when our heroes found their way to the city of Anactorium, near where the mage Miliates made his home. There Theophilos stumbled on the hero Panagos, who was
1) a stratiotes, or a swashbuckler
2) a famous hero of the democratic movement all over the Mediterranean
3) a citizen of Syracuse.
That was low of me, but at least it couldn't be ignored. Soon Theophilos had to debate for his life, as the murderous warrior wanted restitution for the wrongs the philosopher had done in Syracuse. We still don't know exactly what it was that made the Syracuse democrats hate Theophilos, but I'm sure it'll come out one of these days. Something to do with saving his mentor.

Now, it might surprise some, but this was the nearest the philosophers came to death during the adventure. Panagos was ready, and I was ready to kill them if they didn't find a way out. It wasn't hard; Panagos was just protecting his image, expecting that the somewhat famous Theophilos would buckle under and enchance his own image that way. However, there is the D&D factor: this is probably no news, but the traditional game structure builds in some quite strange expectations. One of them is that a D&D character is safe as long as he does what's expected of a D&D character. Like there was some rule saying that the GM cannot kill the characters as long as they attack head on, never retreat and always loot the bodies. Go by these rules, they seem to think, and the GM will be in the wrong if my character dies.

Not that my particular players would anymore hold to these subconsicious assumptions. But it was a close thing. Finally Theophilos understood that he was seeing death, and bowed his head to Panagos, asking forgiveness for what he did in Syracuse. This is surprisingly hard, because that's not the way we have been taught to play in a heroic fantasy game. Always attack, never retreat and always loot the corpses. But it did give us a good scene, some illumination about Theophiloses past and a tidbit about his nature: he is ready to submit if it's necessary. I've had characters killed plenty of times because they cannot conseive that the GM would face them with a superior foe.

After that it was finally time for the revelation of the Antitower of Euthomios Kopris. As the characters knew, the tower was built by the magician to defend against the deprecations of the League of Seven some half a millenium ago, when the magical league rose in unforeseen unity to control the magical knowledge, and ultimately political power, of Greece. This was revealed earlier, and was ultimately decided by me about a year ago. The game has from the start found it's adventure hooks by volume: I write over twenty simple hooks per adventure, let the players pick some and send them forth. The Antitower was one that was never followed up on before now.

Anyway, the rest of the tower was largely improvised when needed. I had some vague notion beforehand that it's an ultimate magical laboratory and that it's underground, being an antitower. There'd probably be also a big red button that'd launch some missiles against the Greyhawk Castle, the ancient citadel of the League of Seven. Other than that, I took it one room at a time.

I should note that from the Pelasgian encounter forwards I had run a long challenge between the Spartans, dwarves and the two philosophers on who'd get first to the tower. The players would tell how each side tried to locate and travel to the tower, and the dice would tell how they'd get distracted. This is, as you know from HQ, a speedy way to get through some less than relevant travel episodes, especially as there were three parties searching the tower.

The dice and tactics degreed finally that the archaelogist philosophers would reach the tower first, while the Spartans would be there the next day, as it should be in an Indy adventure. The dwarves could be the cavalry, as they'd be there another day later. At this stage we had one player otherwise quite out of the game, as both of his characters, prince Kritherion and the dwarven captain Turotsky, were detained when the tower was opened. This didn't bother the game much; the players have slowly learned to enjoy being audience for each other. Must be that I'm driving them to more active play than usual, and they like to get a break from it :D And being that the same player got to play both the evil nazi Spartans and evil chinese dwarves, he got to glower at the frantic explorers when they tried to crack the secrets of the tower.

Anyway, the Antitower: the tower was under a big hill, the only sign of it's existence the fact that it's outer skin still rotated along with the stars. This caused the hill to peel in bands, finally making the tree formations quite distinctive. Theophilos and Eskalides were able to calculate based on the stars where the upper entrance to the tower should be.

From then on the story became what passes for dungeon crawl in this game: foul air, some traps set by the mage, ancient puzzles and stuff. Very Indy. The characters found many wonders, but couldn't penetrate far enough to find the gunpowder.

Then the Lakedaimonians came, with their big shields emblazoned with red lambdas. Scary, and there were a company of them. Kritherion was with them as a "guest", hoping fervently that they'd find the gunpowder and keep their promise to him. At the same time feeling bad, no doubt, about betraying the democrats.

At this stage both Eskalides and Theophilos panicked. The former happened to spot the Spartans with a telescope found in the laboratory, when testing it outside. They were only some six hours distant. Quickly the two decided to split up; Eskalides would try to find a way to destroy the tower, while Theophilos would delay the troop. If Sparta got gunpowder, the whole history of Greece would change inevitably. Neither of the characters believed it'd be for the best.

You see, Eskalides had done as Militiades suggested, and continued burning hypnogogic incence for Theophilos. He'd slowly but surely given the latter a certain mania, a convinction that the tower'd have to be destroyed. It's doubtfull if it'd have worked otherwise, but when the ultimate dictatorship of Sparta came calling even the academic had to hope for destruction.

There followed a feverish and panicked hour, when one player tried to talk the Spartans into the wrong valley, while the other tried one harebrained scheme after another to crack the tower's defences. Eskalides did find a map of the tower, seeing that it was twenty floors deep. They'd got to the third floor before having to stop, and it'd take days to mix the air conditioning chemicals they'd need to get lower.

I should tell you enough about the towers structure to make sense of the finale. It was slow for the players and the characters to figure out what was going on, but they did manage to identify the top floor of the tower: it was an observatory, the biggest they'd ever seen. A gigantic telescope sat on a pedestal there, in a half-ball shaped dark and dank room. The next floor was a library of cosmologic philosophy, and down from that were apparently some living quarters.

Anyway, there was quite the apocalyptic mood going on, when the Spartans laughingly arrested Theophilos and found the excavation into the tower. They decided to camp until morning, and even Kritherion seemed unable or unwilling to do anything, despite the despaired entreaties of Theophilos. It was clear that this was one lost adventure, and we'd soon have a campaign of conquest in our hands when the Spartans would learn the skills of gunpowder.

It's important to note that I was quite ready for the development. It's quite interesting, in an angsty kind of way, if the "heroes" "lose" and something this interesting happens. Players aren't usually that ready for it, some have to stop the game there and then if there's slightest indication that his character would have made a mistake or acted less than heroically. Good training.

But, this was not to be that kind of story. You see, Eskalides, our freemason Indy, was still in the tower. He couldn't get downstairs without suffocating, but neither did the Spartans know he was there. And when the night fell, the Antitower, which rotates with the starts, started to move... in a sudden earthslide the excavation that had revealed the door into the tower disappeared, as the layers of the tower started moving and destabilized the structure. Earth and sand flowed in to the hole until it was no more.

Well, it'd be a simple thing to re-excavate, the door would still be there. Except that when he realized he was being buried alive, Eskalides finally understood his only chance to get out: he ran like possessed to the great telescope in the middle of the dome under the hill and started pulling on the levers situated nearby. First he only managed to turn and swoop the telescope, but with patience, he found the main switch...

When the ancient cupola started to open, at first Eskalides didn't understand what was happening. The rumbling, cracking and hissing and sputter, what was going on in the darkness outside? When the sand started to drop on his head he finally realized that yes, the observatory dome could be opened, but also there'd be tons of earth up there on the hill. Almost instantly, when the dome started to open, the weight cracked the glass under the dome, and then nothing stopped the earth from cracking down into the dome. The first tree to fall in hit the massive telescope, sending it swirling precariously. Eskalides himself escaped to the edge of the dome, where there was yet some protection.

Outside the Spartans could only look on in dismay when first the landslide, and almost immediately after it the whole hill began to sag. They knew already that something was wrong, that the accomplise of the crazy Athenian was in there somewhere. Eskalides had already burned the second level library during the day, and the smoke had alerted the Spartans. Could it be that the bastard had managed to find a way to destroy the tower?

Eskalides himself was meanwhile fighting for his life, as the dome opened wider and wider, letting in an endless stream of earth. He was soon forced to climb back towards the middle, trying to burrow up towards the air. Not surprisingly, the Indy theme was played with enthusiasm for the philosopher's daring deliverance.

The story was ended like a perfect Indiana Jones movie. Kritherion and Theophilos escaped the Spartans in the confusion and saved Eskalides from the ruin. Kritherion was forgiven, Theophilos believed him innocent of betrayal. The Spartans were left to lament the loss of the magical treasure... while under the hill, the actual tower still stood intact. And only Eskalides knew, for he had seen the maps, he understood the stark architecture and enormous depth of the tower. It still stood, and gunpowder was still there. But the secret would be safe with the Conspiracy of Silence.

We played this one last Saturday. Next we'll have again some orientation for new adventures, the course of which depends on if the players want anything special. Kritherion at least was despaired at the end, promising to become a homeless adventurer instead of dabbing at high politics. We'll see.

Anyway, that kind of play. I'm extremely pleased with the players of the weekend group, they're responsive and willing to play. The steps we've taken during the last couple of years are great. I might as well stop the game and start playing Dust Devils, they could handle it. And that's high praise for Finland, where tabletop play is extremely conservative and homogenous.

But why stop, when the game gets better and better? If the players don't lose the premise here, we could have lots of fun seeing how their characters develop. I for one will do my best to continue the game in political lines, arranging tyrannies, oligarchies and democratic systems to confront the characters.

From time to time we get here people who've tried to teach their sim/gam players narrativism. I've found it relatively easy: just stop doing adventures and start instead poking at them with suitable sticks. Either their start quacking or escape through the window.

[greedo1379]

Wow.  That sounds like a really fun adventure.  I think I'll file some of this away for use later.