[1000 Kings] Some questions after reading the playtest draft

[hix]

Hi Ben,

I have a few questions about the playtest draft of Land of a Thousand Kings.

1.  When creating characters, does each player come up the memory of 'another player', or 'the other players'?  In other words, do you only have one memory to give, or one memory about each person in the group?

2.  When setting up the action, you can get 0-2 dice for one object.  I couldn't see any other mention of this in the rules. Is the value of an object based on the group's estimate of the quality (or story impact) of a particular object in a particular conflict?

3.  When you use a spirit in the place of a recollection, do you reduce the number of dice in that spirit?  In fact, do spirits go away at all?  (I may have missed this while reading the rules.)

Looks like a fun game. I may have some follow-up questions later; they'll be concerned with more general things like how to create Kings as cool as your examples.

[Ben Lehman]

1) Each person gets an attribute from every other player, if the other players want to give it.
2) The gatekeeper decides how appropriate the object is to the action involved. I should probably have some guidelines for this. It's basically "how useful is this?"
3) Spirits are only used once, then they go away.

yrs--
--Ben

[Ben Lehman]

Does that answer your questions?

[hix]

It does, thanks.

Turns out I answered my next question on my own. I was wondering where adventures 'come from' when you're playing the game. But now I can see that a situation's going to emerge pretty naturally through a combination of:

-- the player specifying one thing about where they arrive
-- the situation seeds in the Notebook
-- the consequences of actions
-- players writing their own entries in the Notebook.

I'd appreciate any other advice you might have for gatekeepers, on creating interesting situations for Visitors.

[Ben Lehman]

The biggest situation driver is Guestright. People love visitors, and expect visitors to help them with their troubles, particularly dangerous things (visitors can't really die, but ordinary people can.) Not everything is like this, but a lot of things are.

Of course, there is also fateright. If the visitors duck out of situations, just hit them with another one. It's okay to be escalatingly ridiculous about this: ending in, I dunno, a bunch of bandits kidnap you to be their leader.

yrs--
--Ben

[hix]

Great!

That stuff about Guestright really helped click things into place. If you lived in the Land of 1000 Kings, of course you'd ask the extraordinary people who've just arrived, can't die, and are basically objective/neutral to get involved in your side of things. It reminds me of Dogs in the Vineyard, but it's also a very true expression of the game's central idea.

Thanks, Ben.