[Nine Worlds] Euro roleplaying in the Nine Worlds

[GreatWolf]

It's been a long time coming, but finally our group was able to sit down and play Nine Worlds.  Last week we did chargen, but we didn't actually play until a couple days ago.  It's been an interesting go so far.  So, let's dive in!


Getting Started

Let's start at the beginning:  pitching the game to the group.  Just how does one go about summarizing Nine Worlds to his fellow players?  My attempts were two-fold:  "Greek heroes in spaaaace!" and "Mage and Nobilis, done indie-style".  The second was for my wife, who doesn't really know Greek myth, but who has happy memories of both Mage and Nobilis.

I had a similar problem with creating characters.  I knew that Ralph was familiar with the backstory of the game, but I didn't want to require my other players to read all the Nine Worlds backstory.  So, how to get them up to speed quickly?  At one point, I was going to suggest that Crystal and Keith play brand new Archons starting on Earth, letting the character ignorance provide learning opportunities for the players.  And, if this were to be a long-term game, I might have gone that route.  But, as I'm thinking that this will probably be a game that's only a few sessions long, I didn't think that it would be as enjoyable for them.

Then a thought occurred to me.  The setting of Nine Worlds is actually like the setting of Legends of Alyria.  The point isn't about providing a full-blown portrait of the world; rather, it's about communicating a particular vibe and then using setting to communicate specific potential conflicts.  Realizing this, I dipped into my bag of Legends of Alyria tricks.  When we sat down to create characters, I gave a high-level overview of the setting concepts ("this is a Titan", "this is an Archon", and suchlike).  Then I gave basic overviews of the nine worlds, giving a basic sketch of the physical nature of the world, along with its feel.  (e.g.  "Mercury is the hub of trade for the Nine Worlds", "Jupiter is an Orwellian dictatorship")  Once that was done, I asked each player for their top two choices, and we haggled from there.

This seemed to work out fairly well and led naturally into a discussion of character concepts and the like.  In the end, I think that everyone was happy with what they got.

We decided to set the game on Jupiter, at least to start.  I made it clear that this was just the starting point for our game and that we weren't trapped on this world somehow.  Crystal chose to play Quannus, a psychotic Aegis agent, high up in the ranks, but gunning for top spot instead of Herakles.  Keith created Vulcan, a ex-Archer Foundation agent, now a freelance merchant, engineer, and "troubleshooter", trying to do business with Aegis.  Ralph created Kalycos, a Thanatoi dispatched to Jupiter by Hades to recover the soul of Hector...and collect Herakles as well.

All very cool.  I also explained how we were going to focus the game on player vs. player conflict.  Again, a la Legends of Alyria, the PCs would be the primary source of antagonism to each other.  At least in theory.  So, rather than party-oriented play, which spirals outward into the unknown, we'd have PvP play, which would tend to spiral inwards toward each other.


Prepping the Game

So, how to prep for this game?  Originally, I had planned on making a storymap and then having players select their characters.  But, the prep session morphed away from this.  Now I had a collection of PCs and their various Muses.  I had encouraged the players to make up NPCs as parts of their Muses, so I had a few of those.  But now what to do?

I was thinking of prepping Sorcerer-style, with a relationship map and such.  Then I'd choose a Muse from each character as a "Kicker" of sorts, craft opening scenes for each one, and then off we'd go!

Two things stopped me from doing this.

The first was the philosophy of Nine Worlds.  This is a game that's all about questioning the authority of the Game Master, right?  So why should I be prepping opening scenes and having my own situation in place?  Shouldn't I let the players give their characters a shove, and then see where everything goes?  (Reminded me a bit of Land of 1000 Kings, actually.)

The second was laziness.  It's easier to make the players do this work, instead of my laying it out in advance.  Yeah, Ralph, I admit it.

Instead, I decided to do this.  The book lays out the idea of going around the table to frame scenes, so I decided that we'd go with that.  But, for the first go-around, I had each player select one of his starting Muses.  Then I told them to craft a starting scene for their characters involving that Muse.  And we were off!


What Happened in Play

We open with Quannus slipping into the home of the clerk who recently performed a psychological engineering evaluation on her, which revealed the dark side of her personality, including her desire to supplant Herakles.  The clerk is playing with his baby, but that doesn't stop Quannus, who steps behind him, reaches into his body, and grabs hold of his soul.  When it refuses to give, she begins whispering evil lies in his ear, destroying his will to live.  Finally, the clerk's soul releases, slipping free of his body.  The baby falls to the floor, and Quannus makes her escape.

Yeah, pretty disturbing opening.

Next, we cut to Vulcan, who set up a meeting with Herakles to demonstrate his new technology in an attempt to land a contract with Aegis, including manufacturing his latest and best invention, the Black Wolf Power Armor.  Herakles is impressed with the demonstration.  So impressed, in fact, that he seizes the plans from Vulcan and has him escorted from the building.

Then we cut to Kalycos, who slips into the clerk's home.  The baby is dead, so he collects the soul for safe-keeping, until he can return to the Underworld and deposit it.  But, when he goes to collect the soul of the clerk, he finds it missing.  So, he tracks its trail to Quannus, who just realized that, in the thrill of the kill, she had forgotten to steal the file with her evaluation in it.  The file that Kalycos had conveniently taken with him.  They face off but Kalycos is the quicker, seizing the clerk's soul from Quannus.

Back to Vulcan, who has decided that he wants to recover his stolen plans.  So he breaks into Aegis headquarters, evading security, locates the area where the plans are being kept, and cons the clerk into handing them over, claiming that they were being transferred to an "off-site" facility.  So Vulcan makes good his escape.

In the interim, Quannus made contact with Reagus, her contact with the Titans.  Why is she contacting the Titans?  We don't know yet.  (And when I say "we", I include all the players.)  Maybe she is a turncoat.  Maybe she's a double agent.  Maybe she's being set up.  Who can say?  However, Reagus turns out to be the clerk that Vulcan conned.  So, Reagus knows about the Black Wolf Power Armor, but he doesn't know that Aegis just lost control of the plans.  So he tells Quannus that the Titans would be greatly aided by acquiring the plans for this power armor.  So Quannus goes off to track down the plans.  Vulcan manages to cover his trail well, and leads her to a set of fake plans in a locker at the aetherport, which is being staked out by Aegis agents.

So, of course, the agents move in to arrest Quannus.  Their leader, Jericho, is a rival of Quannus's, so he is especially pleased to be taking her down.  Quannus tries to talk her way out of the situation, using her supernaturally persuasive voice, while her Inner Death (a Talisman that is essentially a slice of her soul, given free rein to roam) goes about disarming the agents.  The rest of the squad is held at bay, but Jericho is able to arrest Quannus, hauling her off to jail with a maximum of media attention.

Cut back to Kalycos.  He's located Hector's ghost; Herakles is keeping him around as an adviser.  Kalycos goes to talk to Herakles, reminding him of the law regarding the dead.  He's very polite.  Herakles respects Kalycos' position but requests an extension of time, citing the current crisis.  Ninety days is all Herakles asks for.  Kalycos continues to be polite as he points out that Herakles himself is overdue in the Underworld.  Is he a lawbreaker also?  Hector heeds Kalycos's words, as he is a man of honor, but Herakles throws Kalycos out of his office.

And that's where we wrapped for the night.


Post Game Thoughts

This isn't a deep, introspective game.  Rather, it's more of an action movie, with kewl people doing kewl stuff with kewl powerz.

I like it!

I'm also enjoying the "inward spiral" of events, as we continue to take various peripheral entities from the various PCs and tie them together in a tangled mess of events.  The plans for the Black Wolf Power Armor make for a great MacGuffin, and the various crossing of characters seems to be working well to draw the characters further into inexorable conflict.

I am also finding that introducing and statting NPCs is the biggest trick for this game.  Granted, at least part of this is my rustiness with balancing "combat" encounters.  I  tried to follow the advice given in this thread, when I wasn't pulling stats from the book.  In general, I probably undershot, as most of the characters the Archons dealt with weren't really all that powerful and, in a game dedicated to player authority, I am particularly concerned about overriding that simply by bludgeoning the PCs with uber-NPCs.   Jericho was statted out around starting Archon level, though, and was able to take on Quannus effectively.  Of course, some of this is the result of players learning the system, which leads naturally into...


My Thoughts on the Nine Worlds System

It occurred to me that Nine Worlds is a Euro-style roleplaying game.

Let me explain.

Over the last ten to fifteen years, there's been an invasion of the United States by a new breed of boardgame.  Most of these come from Germany and, more broadly, from Europe, and feature specific named designers (e.g. Reiner Knizia, Wolfgang Kramer), as opposed to a company's branding (e.g. Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley).  These games tend to focus on mechanics first, with a different understanding of the connection between mechanics and theme.

Many of these games are economics games, such as Caylus, Princes of Florence, and Puerto Rico.  In these games, you have to develop an economic infrastructure, enabling the gathering of resources that enable you to build up your infrastructure further, eventually enabling you to perform the necessary buying/selling/shipping/whatever necessary to earn victory points and, ultimately, win the game.

That's also quite possibly the driest, most boring explanation of these games.  EVAR.  Because they are actually a lot of fun.

However, good play in these games requires that you understand the mechanics of how Resource A is gathered, converted into Resource B, spent to increase Infrastructure which allows you to collect Resource C, which, in turn, delivers victory points.  You have to do a great deal of look-ahead and understand how the decisions that you are making now shape your effectiveness later.

This is exactly what the Nine Worlds system requires.

On first look, the system doesn't actually seem like much.  Draw a bunch of cards (the more, the better), and pick whatever gives you the best value.  Ooh yay.  And then there's this bit about a victor being able to choose to go another phase.  Why would you ever do that?  I mean, if you won conflict, then you won, right?  At the same time, there feels like lots of fiddly bits.  Just like some of the best Eurogames, Nine Worlds simultaneously feels like there's not enough in the game while feeling overly complicated. 

But no.  Because, see, conflict also results in Points (Resource A), which are then invested in Infrastructure (Muses and temporary Urge and Virtue ratings), which allow a superior outcome in future conflict.  Of course, to take advantage of your temporary ratings, you need to go another phase in conflict, especially hoping to get some Stasis to lock your temporary gains into a more permanent form.  Then, of course, there's the need to earn the right majority of victories on a given Muse before resolving it, so that you can earn Valor or Hubris (Resources B and C), thus allowing you to improve your Infrastructure in other ways, thus allowing you to better overcome in conflict.  Of course, your long-term Infrastructure and your best means of running this engine is through multiple overlapping Muses.  Therefore, you need to plan your Muses as stepping stones through the fiction, racking up their ratings and using them to fuel yourself....

And so it goes.

It's very clever, actually, and I think that the "game-y" aspects of it will become a lot of fun in play.  In particular, I think that Crystal will come to enjoy this angle of play.  However, that requires a level of proficiency with the system that the players are still developing.  It's not D&D, but Nine Worlds has a significant tactical element to it that could be easily overlooked by someone expecting a "hippy storygame" experience from the game.

I have to tip my hat to you, Matt.  It wasn't at all what I was expecting from the game.

But I like it.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Seth,

Can you give this thread a Forge-specific focus? I think that's important when you hit several sites with similar reports.

Best, Ron

[GreatWolf]

Sure.  At the very least, I have a couple questions about the game.

1)  When we played, it seemed like there was very little "free play" narration outside of conflict.  So, a given scene played out by setting up a conflict, then playing it through using the conflict system.  Is this just a symptom of our beginning the learning curve of this game?  Or is this how Nine Worlds usually plays?  Again, we had fun, but I did feel like we were bouncing from conflict to conflict without much in the way of "downtime".  Any thoughts or advice on this from those familiar with the game?

2)  Based on a fellow player's comments, I'll describe Nine Worlds conflict as moving from the Abstract to the Concrete.  You begin with the "What am I trying to accomplish?", then move through the abstractrations of the conflict system, which eventually leads to the concrete outcome narration.  In particular, as I describe above, the resource management game seems like a significant disconnect from the events occurring in the fiction.  Am I missing something?  Is there a better way to integrate these things?  Or am I just thinking about this incorrectly?

[Ron Edwards]

I think your two points are related, and my suggestion, actually, is to work away from this trend. Return, to some extent, to plain old role-playing. I'm not talking about maundering instead of scene-framing, I'm talking about doing stuff within a scene prior to reaching for the cards. Scene creation without conflict creation, but with scenes full of individuals trying to do stuff - hence conflicts emerge, not necessarily anticipated ones. Nine Worlds works very well with this principle in mind, much like Dust Devils does (and that's where I developed my scene & conflict rules for Trollbabe, by playing Dust Devils).

Best, Ron