Egypt Needs Characters (and a few mechanics)

[Mithras]

Contracycle, Mike - what am I going to use? There's lots of things I like, especially the linkage between Egypt and its people. Especially the use of stats for state and characters, the idea of supporting a prince and building him up through your own vision of what he should be.

Whatever you decide to use, I think we can safely say it will not end up up being remotely like my Egypt-game! We'll twist the stuff in different directions for sure. Don't hold back on account of me. Don't 'save' ideas on my account. Write away ...

I don't think the Indus crowd had dynasties - but if they did no-one knows about it.

[contracycle]

I'm no expert on the Indus valley - yes, I have heard the claim that they had very little in the way of violence or dynasties - probably.  It has also been claimed that the large buildings were used directly by the common folk.  It's some thing that might be worth exploring in its own right; OTOH we don't need to stay in the Indus.  Personally, I suspect we will eventually discover a coercive agency; IMO monumental architecture recquires social stratification.

But given this concern, we might as well make a clean decision on what to choose.  The advantage of the Indus is flexibility, in that it is little defined.  However, this makes greater demand on us to create detail and a sense of place.  The advantage of a well-known society - say Athens - lies in the opportunity to at least attempt a "world-view" game from etsablished data.  Perhaps the Minoans would be better in this regard.  Some of these have been tackled before, although IMO

[Mike Holmes]

OK, I did a bit of research to expand my small Indus Valley civ knowledge base.

I'm no expert on the Indus valley - yes, I have heard the claim that they had very little in the way of violence or dynasties - probably.  It has also been claimed that the large buildings were used directly by the common folk.  It's some thing that might be worth exploring in its own right; OTOH we don't need to stay in the Indus.  Personally, I suspect we will eventually discover a coercive agency; IMO monumental architecture recquires social stratification.

Well, actually there is very little, really in the way of "monumental" architecture, it would seem. In fact, given their seemingly very advanced architecture and engineering, the public buildings they built are pretty underwhelming. The one that everyone points to is the bath in the central city of Mo...I forget the spelling. But anyhow, from the pictures and whatnot, it is not really a very stiring monument.

Compare this to the fact that they had some of the best laid out cities and city services (sewers!) that the ancient world ever saw. Compared to the pictures of one of their harbors that used a diverted river to create slips that were as or more impressive as the docks in many modern cities, the public buildings are pretty humble. On top of this, there is no sign that that bath was not a site for general public use, as opposed to a palace or other tribute type edifice. They definitely had an incredibly organized civilization. But just as certainly, it seems, they don't seem to have used a lot of that coercion to build what we normally think of as monumnets.

But given this concern, we might as well make a clean decision on what to choose.  The advantage of the Indus is flexibility, in that it is little defined.  However, this makes greater demand on us to create detail and a sense of place.

I completely agree. We would almost be creating a civilization out of thin air. For example, we would have to detail the entire religion as all we know about it was that they likely venerated bull horns and the leaves of a certain tree. Not a lot to go on.

Worse, they have very little in the way of picture carvings, and their writing is, as yet, undeciphered. Mostly what we know is that there was a huge civilization (much bigger then Egypt or Mesopotamian civs in land size) that had remarkable city planning. I'm not sure that's enough to make a game on. And if we make up all the rest, it begs the question, why not just do a fantasy kingdom from scratch?

The advantage of a well-known society - say Athens - lies in the opportunity to at least attempt a "world-view" game from etsablished data.  Perhaps the Minoans would be better in this regard.  Some of these have been tackled before, although IMO

Yep. The other ideas I had were to do an ancient Yellow River civ, or something Southeast Asian. In that case we're talking Huong Vang (SP?) in vietnam, or doing later kingdoms like the Khmer, Cham, or Mon. There's a lot to work with there, but these are always in the shadow of the Chinese civilization. The earlier stuff (like the Huong Vang) is very speculative, but at least there are lots of legends about the era.

We're dancing around the obvious choice, though, which is Mesopotamia. One of the cool things about that civ is how it's central authority changed from city-state to city-state and even from culture to culture (Assyrians, Hittites, Chaldeans, etc). There could be a very interesting premise in there, somewhere.

I'm very tempted to just create a fictional place and steal what we need from actual history. But then how is that not just another fantasy game? Hmmm...

Paul, I agree that we'll certainly end up with different stuff. Just wanted to make sure we weren't horning in on anything sacred.

Thanks,
Mike

[contracycle]

We're dancing around the obvious choice, though, which is Mesopotamia. One of the cool things about that civ is how it's central authority changed from city-state to city-state and even from culture to culture (Assyrians, Hittites, Chaldeans, etc). There could be a very interesting premise in there, somewhere.

Right.  I'd be cool with Mesopotamia.  

I'm very tempted to just create a fictional place and steal what we need from actual history. But then how is that not just another fantasy game? Hmmm...

Well, a kinda model I have been toying with on and off would be to play a game which actually created a civilisation.  Difficult to conceptualise, but with a dynastic structure, obviously the culture will accrete data and depth over time.  Might be doable, I don't know yet.  The mechanics would have to be structured to prompt player behaviour in this direction.

Course, another idea might be A Canticle For Leibowitz.  It rides close to post-apocalypse stuff but is spread across a good thousand years IIRC; anyway it might be feasible to start at a point in the future which is sufficiently removed from the present that all the dead technology stuff is irrelevant.  IIRC the story was a partial retelling of the "irish monks save civilisation in the dark ages" concept.

I think perhaps we need to refine our explicit goals.  I am interested in:

1) pseudo-archeological RP, or perhaps "psycho-archeology"
2) construction of plausibly consistent environments
3) experimenting with the process of history


Anyway, tjhought it needs mentioning.  also, maybe we are thoroughly hijacking this thread and need a new one.

Paul, I agree that we'll certainly end up with different stuff. Just wanted to make sure we weren't horning in on anything sacred.

I would be concerned that we use a "key concept" that makes it hard to differentiate the two.  That I would not want to do.

[Mithras]

We're dancing around the obvious choice, though, which is Mesopotamia.

Yeah! I love that. My next project (right, like I'm going to get around to it!!! So much you can do with Mesopotamia. I've got half written games, all abandoned. One that made it to the web is called Babel - its on my site. Barely the beginnings of what you could do, though.

Well, a kinda model I have been toying with on and off would be to play a game which actually created a civilisation.

Pendragon, generation roleplaying - from the start of a civilization. Each game encapsulates the mood and motions of one generation (30 yrs). Wow.

[Mithras]

I'm getting my threads confused now Mike!!

What about a system where Egyptian characters create a dead ancestor to play alongside the PC. This other group have adventures in the Afterlife and impinging on the realworld involving the PCs (see the newly filmed series of Randal and Hopkirk? The detectiv's murdered partner continues to help him crack cases even though he's a ghost).

[Mike Holmes]

Even better, start like you say, but when the player's PC dies, that PC becomes the dead ancestor, and the PCs son becomes the PC. Die without heir, and you are out of the game.

How's that for enforcing the ancient worldview?

Mike

[contracycle]

Well, perhaps this could be summed up as a concept of "biographical"; RPG. The idea is to make characters who have interesting lives in interesting times and playing over the whole course of that life.  In a sequence of such lives, with any luck, a world (or at any rate a city or culture) is explore or created or maybe both.  Anyway, that's the goal, and this is what I have been able to come up with based on Mikes excellent ideas about choosing the post in the bureaucracy on so on, although I may have gotten carried away.

The idea is intended to deliberately establish an explicit game frame, so as to support explicit scene framing in order to do time compression such that a group of characters can live out the critical junctures of their lives.  That's the hope, anyway.  This requires that the participants are aware at the metagame level that are cutting to the significant events and so forth, although the actual play of any given scene is in real time.  In this pattern A Game is more or less the lives of a group of contemporaries in a significant historical moment; A Campaign would be a sequence of these generations so as to develop a progressively evolving environment over substantial chunks of game time.  Part of the mechanics would map to a system of cultural representation which I have not had time to think about yet. I don't think there's any structural need to have characters in each game period necessarily descend from prior characters, let alone prior characters of the same player, but players may choose to do so and perhaps some mechanics could be written to support that.

The first step in the metagame is to establish a frame.  The frame constitutes an immediate historical backdrop and the critical junctures of a given period which will be followed in game time.  The players and the GM may/should cooperate in the selection of elements which constitute the frame.  If a premise is to be employed it is conceived and discussed here.  Once the elements of the frame have been agreed upon, it must be narrowed down to the actual window of game and real time across which the live game will occur.  First of all, a rough length of time should be established for the frame; the length of time within the frame will be of critical value in scene framing.  An estimate should also be agreed of the number of sessions of real time that the game will occur across, again for later use in scene framing.

The second step (still in the metagame) is the creation of characters.  Characters should be created with the critical junctures in mind - indeed, character selection may tacitly occur prior to or during frame selection.  This step consists primarily of realizing the character mechanically and marrying it to the frame, including adapting or rewriting existing characters to accord with the new frame, moving them on in years, adjusting their relationships, or circumstances (thus, there is no other mechanical character development).  The character should probably be developed or re-conceived with the premise in mind.  Character development should be as freeform as possible although mechanically related to the frame; preferably with as much player creation as possible.  The characters should be created as a group with social bonds and interlocking personal relationships; IOW a relationship map should be constructed based directly upon each of the characters, filled out with all the appropriate NPC's (which could/should be generated collectively and consciously).  These maps should interlock, and their interactions consciously devised with reference to the elements agreed upon in the frame.  In this structure, a personal level association between characters is necessary - the dramatic dynamic exists between these characters and provides the immediate context of actual play.  The characters are not allies, they are protagonists in the situation expressed by the fame.  Potentially, each character should also have something like an unresolved conflict, to use the psychobabble, with each other character.

A this point we have: an idea of how long we are going to play, how much in game time is going to pass, a set of personally interrelated characters who are the protagonists in a loose context defined by the frame.  The GM then constructs a set of scenes in which the frame crisis appears and plays out.  The actual scene conceptualization will depend heavily on the elements agreed in the frame, the individual identities of the player characters, and the NPC's generated in stage two.  The GM's purpose, in a sense, is to knit the player characters together into an experience in which they interact and play off each other.  There are villains if the players designed villain NPC's; there are natural disasters if natural disasters were agreed upon in the frame (but hey, the GM should be get to play too, and IMO with a hidden hand).  The game is executed in real time and the natural disasters duly occur and the dastardly villains do villainous deeds; the characters respond, interact.  By definition, those scenes that occur are those which feature player characters in protagonised roles; all other scenes occur for expository purposes only.  Obviously, the more characters in any given scene the better, but if they are all linked that should not be too hard.  In this regard character design might possibly be done with some sense in which the characters can be valuable to one another in the pursuit of their objectives.  The idea is that with the interlocked R-map design, on the principles of degrees of separation an explicit path exists between characters and so scenes can be devised to bring them into play with one another.  The princess and the pauper share a relationship with a captain of the guard; the GM thus frames to scene in which the pauper is captured stealing bread by the captain, in such a manner that the princess can hear his forlorn but beautiful singing voice from the cell in the guardhouse.

Mechanically, I still like the idea of combining of the land and the personal at the metaphysical level; for one thing, this way we really can do prophecies.  Its possible that could be optional too;  it could be part of what is agreed upon in the frame.  The elements of the frame exist so as to realize the setting so for a given culture or period you would find a good candidate crisis or something, cameo historical characters if you want, go heavy on the colour.  If you're doing it "experimentally", to creatively define an unknown culture (and in a real sense, all historical cultures are known only by their shadows, as it were) then you could employ something like a Civ-like tech tree and through successive framings agree and develop say a religion or a dynasty or whatever.    It's all inward looking too; external cultures only serve to provide elements to the frame, or the symptoms of crises.  As for task resolution, well the idea here is really to cooperate in colouring in the frame, so I'd be inclined to a system that did not much regulate character activity.  I am kinda thinking of a system, almost a magic system in a sense, in which characters solve problems by realizing parts of their environment, although I do still see the GM having a role in handling consistency; maybe someone has some ideas about that.  The players should accrue rather than spend game currency by realizing the world.  If the scene is "The Flight From Pompeii", players are rewarded for bringing in a fisherman they know whose boat they can run for, whatever.  The GM'role is primarily to handle the sim, I guess.  

Anyway, thoughts welcome.

[Mike Holmes]

The question is how to do all the above, and not just make it a rehash of Aria (which claims to do many of the same things).

Mike

[Valamir]

Given the subject matter of egyptian/messopotamian settings that have been discussed for this game, may I suggest you give a good read to one of my all time favorite books James Michener's  The Source.

This massive tome basically traces (in the guise of an archeaological dig) the entire history of a small Palestinian city from prehistorical settlements right through the the jews, hittites, assyrians, babylonians, romans, etc.

It is really a perfect image of what CC is discussing above.  The characters lives in each chapter are aggressively cut to highlight just the key moments of their existance (usually centered around a particular artifact "discovered" by the parallel story of archeaologists).  Similiar the different "generations" specifically avoid the generations where nothing much happened and cut right to the next historical "bang".

Its a huge book to read, but I've read it now at least 3 times and just can't get over how incredibly ambitious the majority of Micheners projects are.

[Mike Holmes]

Heh, this is why Ralph and I work together. I, too, was tinking recently that The Source would be a good, well, source for this game. I also heartily recommend it for anyone who is able to take Michener's length. I know he's not for everybody, but Ralph is right. It's very much like what Gareth describes.

Mike[/quote]

[Mike Holmes]

Can we assume from your lack of continued posting on this thread (not to mention your appearance on the Mesopotamian thread) that you have moved into that solo writing phase that you mentioned? I hope so; I really want to see how this one turns out.

Mike

[Mithras]

I have, yes. How much I'll get done I'm not sure, but I'm putting down my first version onto disc. I think too much debate gets my head spinning - all good ideas with no real way to pick out what will work from what will not.

I'll carry on with the Mesopotamian debate as well as post irregularly on the Kap as I encounter problems.

Thanks all!