[Univeralis] Actual Play - The Shadow of the Dragon

[emaise]

Yesterday, a few friends came over and we played Universalis. Well, we had a blast.  Since this was the first time playing for any of us, I had to teach the rules and we all had to feel our way through them.  We only played for a couple of hours and only made it through the story setup and one scene, but even so we had a lot of fun.

The story that came out was set in feudal Japan, with mystical martial arts, an evil emperor, his beautiful daughter banished for marrying a peasant, honorable ninjas, and a lost amulet of great power whose name became the title of the story.  The really cool part is that all of this was created on the fly, one piece at a time, with everyone contributing ideas on the spur of the moment.

One or two of the players will probably write up the story in actual narrative form.  But to give you a sense of how the story developed piece by piece, I'm posting the log of what actually happened during the game itself.

Universalis Game Log - The Shadow Of The Dragon

Session One: Sat 10/15/2005
Players: jh, em, jm, sp, mw

Setup:

em  - Mood: Not too silly
jh  - Setting: Set in feudal Japan
mw  - Mood: No scantily clad women
jm  - Setting: Involves the peasants
sp  - Setting: Good guys are good looking, bad guys are ugly
em  - Story: There will be an act of rank treachery
mw  - Story: The hero(ine) of the story is a woman
sp  - Story: The heroine has tanuki allies (Japanese badger spirits)
em  - Character: Heroine - of the nobility, beautiful, married
jh  - Setting: Martial arts training conveys mystical powers
mw  - Location: Rice paddy in winter - flooded, cold
jm  - Object: Amulet - missing
sp  - Character: Heroine's husband - poor, handsome, skilled at martial arts
em  - Characters: Tanuki - group, spirits, intelligent, clever

Scene One: Framed by jm

jm  - Time: now
jm  - Character: Heroine's father - evil, emperor
jm  - Location: Emperor's vacation home - just outside of Kyoto
jm  - Characters: Ninjas - honorable, group
jm  - Setting: The emperor has called the ninjas to his throne room
jm  - Setting: He knows of a ritual that can increase his own powers tenfold
jm  - Story: He orders the ninjas to search for the components required for the ritual
jm  - Story: The ninjas are concerned because this is contradictory to their code of honor

jh  - Object: Mystical scroll
        - describes the way to increase one's mystical power
        - requires unknown components
jh  - Object (added traits): Amulet
        - focuses ki power
        - is the component required by the scroll

mw  - Story: The tanuki have been listening outside the throne room
mw  - Story: They leave to tell the heroine about her father's evil plot
mw  - Move scene: Rice paddy in winter

sp  - Setting: The heroine and her husband are in the rice paddy
sp  - Character (added trait): Heroine - banished for marrying a peasant
sp  - Story: The tanuki tell them about the overheard conversation
sp  - Story: The husband suggests they go to the monastery
sp  - Location: Monastery - Abbott
sp  - Move scene: Monastery
sp  - Setting: The abbott says he knows what the missing component is

em  - Setting: ... but he's wrong.
em  - Rule: Friendly interjections
em  - Object: Sword - mystical, ancient, hidden in the shadow of Mt. Fuji

sp  - Story: The abbott sends the heroine and her husband to look for the sword
sp  - Location: Mt. Fuji
sp  - Move scene: Mt. Fuji

em  - Location (added trait): Mt. Fuji - inn
em  - Story: The couple check into an inn
em  - Character: Swordsmith
em  - Story: The abbott told the couple that if they prove themselves worthy,
      the swordsmith would tell them the location of the sword

jh  - Story: The ninjas have come to the inn disguised as a travelling kabuki theater troupe
jh  - Characters (added trait): Ninjas - disguised as kabuki troupe
jh  - Story: The ninjas have heard about the swordsmith and plan to kidnap him
jh  - Character (added trait): Swordsmith - likes kabuki

mw  - Story: A small crowd of peasants come to the inn to watch the kabuki troupe, including the swordsmith
mw  - Story: One of the peasants accuses one of the "kabuki actors" of impregnating his daughter

jh  - Story: ... but he's lying!

mw  - Story: He just wants one less mouth to feed.
mw  - Conflict: The peasants angrily confront the "kabuki troupe"...

Conflict begins:

em  - Characters: A small crowd of theater watchers - group, peasants, drinking

jm  - Setting: The emperor is travelling to Mt. Fuji
jm  - Setting: He is keeping tabs on the ninjas
jm  - Character (added trait): Emperor - suspicious
jm  - Character: Emperor's spy

Everyone started claiming traits to get dice for the conflict:
  - The ninja's "honorable" got used against them
  - mw claimed "rank treachery" for a die

Results:
  - Winners: jh, sp: swordsmith, heroine, husband, tanuki
  - Losers: mw, jm: ninja, emperor's spy
  - Loser: em: small crowd of peasants

jh  - Story: While some of the ninja are dealing with the crowd, a few spot the
      swordsmith, and sneak away from the crowd to get him
sp  - Story: The heroine and her husband rescue the swordsmith from the ninja
mw  - Setting: But the swordsmith is actually working for the emperor! (rank treachery)
mw  - Character (added trait): Swordsmith - working for the emperor
mw  - Story: The swordsmith knocks the heroine to the ground and runs away
jm  - Story: The emperor's spy runs back to the emperor to report on the events
em  - Story: The crowd charges the "kabuki troupe", who toss them flying around the stage
em  - Story: The props are smashed, the costumes torn, and the set lies in tatters
em  - Characters (added trait): Crowd - sore
em  - Characters (removed trait): Ninjas - disguised as kabuki troupe

jm  - Story: The emperor reaches his palace atop Mt. Fuji and retires for the night
jm  - End of scene.

jh  - Object (added trait): Amulet - named "The Shadow of the Dragon"
mw  - Game: That's also the name of the story.

End of session.

The log doesn't capture the feel of the session itself. We had a lot of fun adding descriptions and narration beyond just the simple facts above (known in game terms as "color"), and it was great to see the interaction between the players when one person came up with an idea that fed into an idea from someone else.

We all enjoyed the game and had a lot of fun. We all also thought the story as it was developing was getting interesting, so we agreed to play more sessions later and continue the same story.

[Mike Holmes]

Hmm, this confirms my thoughts that your version of the rules that you've cobbled together is making for a very unusual game of Universalis. Not bad or anything, just very different than any Universalis play I've ever seen anywhere else.

Mike

[emaise]

Hmm, this confirms my thoughts that your version of the rules that you've cobbled together is making for a very unusual game of Universalis. Not bad or anything, just very different than any Universalis play I've ever seen anywhere else.

I should probably point out that the notations above like "Story:" and "Conflict:" and "Mood:" and so forth weren't used as formal game mechanics while we were playing.  I added them myself after-the-fact when I was reconstructing the game log based on the actual notes that were taken during play.  For the log, I've used different terminology than the standard Universalis terms of "Events" and "Complications" and "Tenets" etc... but terminology aside, I think the game may not be as unusual as you think.

Again, not that either "usual" or "unusual" is bad or anything...  Anyway, we'll see what happens in the next session, when we use the real rules.  When I write up the logs, I'll probably keep using my own terms; I'm ornery that way. :)

[Mike Holmes]

It's really hard to tell from the log what play was like. You say that you excised all of the color from the log? Or were there two logs being kept or something? Why did you cut the color out? Did you have names for characters? Names aren't color, but have mechanical significance. Did you do any dialog?

Without a more complete log, it's really hard to tell how different this game was or not from more standard play. It'll be interesting to see what effect this session of play has on your ongoing play once you're playing from the rules.

Mike

[emaise]

It's really hard to tell from the log what play was like.

Definitely.  The log is very mechanical and dry; play was fluid and entertaining.  I wanted to post the log to show how, at least in our case, Universalis helped us build a story from scratch by adding individual pieces created on the fly.

You say that you excised all of the color from the log? Or were there two logs being kept or something? Why did you cut the color out?

During play, we made cards for components and wrote traits on the cards.  We also kept notes in a Word doc on the laptop where we recorded Tenets and Events.  Afterwards, I went back through the cards and notes and reconstructed the individual actions of the players, writing it up as the log above; it only records things that had coins spent on them.

The log isn't really intended to show all the interaction between the players or to be an entertaining narrative.  When we were done, a couple of the players said they wanted to write up the results as an actual story, so I'm leaving that to them.  I just wanted to preseve an official record of the mechanical actions (and share it with The Forge).

Did you have names for characters? Names aren't color, but have mechanical significance.

Oddly enough, only one component got named at all, and that happened at the very end (the amulet, which then became the title of the story as well).  I think in the next session, now that we're interested enough in the story to keep it going, we'll want to name the characters.  I'm hoping one of the other players can come up with reasonable Japanese names; the best I could do would be to pull names from Akira.

Did you do any dialog?

We didn't, and in retrospect I'm disappointed that we didn't.  I think both this and the lack of character names show that in this session we treated the game very much like a scriptwriters' brainstorming tool and less like an RPG or a story-telling game.  Things stayed pretty high-level.  Still very entertaining, but I know we can do a lot more with the system.

Without a more complete log, it's really hard to tell how different this game was or not from more standard play. It'll be interesting to see what effect this session of play has on your ongoing play once you're playing from the rules.

If nothing else, I think this session gave us a solid start on a good story.  In future sessions I'm going to push for more developed scenes, more detail, more dialog, more interaction between characters, and more complications.  I'm not sure that the session logs I keep will be more complete than what I've posted here; writing too much down as we go does distract whoever is doing the writing, and I personally don't like recreating or rewriting detailed narratives after the fact.  Speaking in character is fun during the game; writing dialog down afterwards seems like work to me.  But if one of our players does it, I'll post it here.

Thanks again for your comments, and for the game.

  - Eddie