[Hex Rangers] Strange Fruit revisited

[charles ferguson]

If players aren't getting what magic is supposed to be in your game then giving lots of examples has got to be a good idea.

I also think the rules need to explicitly tell players when they're in the ballpark.

Something like this:

A. Everyone has to write 1 line "Magical Trigger" at chargen: something concrete that must occur or be present for their own magic to work.

Ie:

"fire"
"I speak Egyption backward"
"a mirror"
"tears"
"Someone must be bleeding"
"a heart must be broken"
"the moon goes behind a cloud"

etc.

B. For magic to occur, the following has to be true:

1) the magic-worker's Trigger has to be present or occur in the scene
2) the magic's effect must be something that could be mistaken for something natural by others
3) either the act of working the magic, or the object of the magic, or the magical effect must draw on a personal emotion for the magic-worker [what a "personal emotion" is could be purely interpretational, or you could define it in the text, or it could be linked mechanically to something on the character sheet like a stat or backstory]

Cheers, charles

[David Berg]

Teaching:

In Delve I have more experienced adventurers teach the PCs some tools of the trade.  In DitV, the setting of the intro conflicts gives the GM an opportunity to establish the views/doctrine of your order's higher-ups.  Do you think it would be fun to play through some grizzled veteran Hex Ranger teaching your player characters a ritual?  Sounds cool to me...

Recipes:

I'm not sure what y'all have against the "recipe", but I'm going to guess: it tends to be creatively stifling, either too simple (thus predictable and repetitive) or too complex (thus laborious to track and use).  I think a middle ground can be found, but I agree it's a real challenge.  I wonder, though, if this challenge doesn't derive largely from the constraint of using in-gameworld logic for recipes.  I haven't seen a real stab at an about-gameworld recipe system, which seems to be what's called for here.  You know, where recipes are guided by aesthetics more than causality.

To me, Charles' ideas look like an effort to create some in-gameworld rules based on some aesthetics.  Some amount of that might need doing at some point, but I think trying to nail the aesthetic recipe first would be cool.

Skull-fucking raccoons:

Marshall, that's interesting that your big complaint was the weak causal connection.  I posed that example thinking just in terms of ritual color.  To me, skull-fucking seems like a shock-value punchline, appropriate to nothing natural or serious.  If one of my players proposed that, I'd think he was trying to gross me out or make me laugh rather than getting into the fiction.

I'm hoping that if we can corral a good set of impermissible stuff, maybe you can churn out some good descriptors of what's desirable.  So, crappy ritual #3:

Burn the village elder alive to remove the unnatural cold hanging over the village.

[Marshall Burns]

David,
Not so much a lack of a causal connection as the complete lack of "skullfucking a racoon" representing, like, anything.

But this new one, "Burn the village elder alive to remove the unnatural cold hanging over the village," is superb. Twisted, and something I would only consider using as a last resort, but superb.

Charles,
I'm not big on the "magical trigger" idea. But some character trait to use as a starting point, not a requirement, could be good.

I am suddenly put in mind that, the playtests with Steven & Kourtney, in which the magic was cool (except for one time that served to teach me that magic needs to be a big-deal and its own scene, not something casual), there was a rules difference. You had to create a few hexes (or amulets or whatever) in chargen.

I took that rule out because the magic that was created that way never got used. But maybe it should go back in, or something like it.

[northerain]

Hi Marshall.
I love your setting. I'm jealous because I had a similar idea which I was going to use as a hack for my game. I described it as From Hell meets Sleepy Hollow.

The magic thing is something both me and my codesigner were playing around with for Dark Days. We ended up not caring since it wasn't a big part of the game, but I still think about it because I want to use it for a new project.

I think that in your case, it would be interesting for players to create a couple of rituals for their characters. Like signature moves, each character has a couple trusty old rituals, while he can come up with new ones when he feels like it. That way you have something that will help you in the way.

As far as explaining goes, folk magic isn't terribly hard to do I think. Use elements like blood, fire, flowers, earth. The ritual itself is more than a grocery list, but with those elements, it's easier to come up with things.

As an example, when playtesting an early build of my game, we used some magic with no rules. They were in a haunted hotel looking for a room which they couldn't find. The number just didn't exist. One of the players cut himself and used the blood to draw the number of the room they were looking for on a door that led to a storage space.

That's a basic ritual, but being familiar with the element of blood made it easier to find.


As a third option, use foci or schools of magic. A guy that has a crow's skull hung around his neck can use that to locate dead bodies by swinging it over a map.

[northerain]

Hi Marshall.
I love your setting. I'm jealous because I had a similar idea which I was going to use as a hack for my game. I described it as From Hell meets Sleepy Hollow.

The magic thing is something both me and my codesigner were playing around with for Dark Days. We ended up not caring since it wasn't a big part of the game, but I still think about it because I want to use it for a new project.

I think that in your case, it would be interesting for players to create a couple of rituals for their characters. Like signature moves, each character has a couple trusty old rituals, while he can come up with new ones when he feels like it. That way you have something that will help you in the way.

As far as explaining goes, folk magic isn't terribly hard to do I think. Use elements like blood, fire, flowers, earth. The ritual itself is more than a grocery list, but with those elements, it's easier to come up with things.

As an example, when playtesting an early build of my game, we used some magic with no rules. They were in a haunted hotel looking for a room which they couldn't find. The number just didn't exist. One of the players cut himself and used the blood to draw the number of the room they were looking for on a door that led to a storage space.

That's a basic ritual, but being familiar with the element of blood made it easier to find.


As a third option, use foci or schools of magic. A guy that has a crow's skull hung around his neck can use that to locate dead bodies by swinging it over a map.