Long ago, on the Birthday Forum last Spring, Eero Tuovinen made the terrible mistake of suggesting a transposition of My Life with Master as Levi-Strauss in Amazonia. I apologize, but I had to do it. I mean, he even mentioned my name!

So here's a link:
Levi-Strauss in Amazonia PDF

Now one really, really important thing about this, which is stated twice in the game but can't be overstressed. This is very much plagiarism. I have stolen 100% of the mechanics, and a certain chunk of the prose, from Paul Czege's game. I hope Paul will see this as a tribute, imitation being the sincerest flattery and all, but under no circumstances should anyone be playing this who hasn't paid for Paul's game. If you do that, you go straight to hell, do not collect $200. Paul, if you have a suggestion for opening prose, or means of web-posting, or copyright info, or whatever, that will protect your game and your rights, I'd be delighted to hear them.

I am already starting to tinker with it a bit in order to emphasize a few points, and I would be very interested in any comments, suggestions, or whatever -- even from Paul. :>

1. Currently, it's not clear enough why Levi-Strauss's Empathy is poisonous to the society. We see that it's destructive to the informants, but it's much more important that it be an ugly undercurrent in the whole scenario.

2. I'm not convinced that the endgame options for Levi-Strauss make sense in the terms pose.

3. I don't think it's clear what sorts of things Levi-Strauss might command, other than stealing stuff. More importantly, it's not clear what Levi-Strauss is actually doing with all this material he's gathering, nor how that affects gameplay. I think that's very important, but I can't see quite how to do it.

Anyway, I look forward to comments and criticisms.

Paul, my apologies!

I like the idea. There's something about anthropology... I'm kind of hesitant to put it into words, but it seems like reality and identity get real thin when cultures meet. Not exactly what your game is looking for (impression from a quick browse), but still... anthropology! Definitely a "want to try" kind of game. (Yes, I have MLWM).

matthijs wrote: I like the idea. There's something about anthropology... I'm kind of hesitant to put it into words, but it seems like reality and identity get real thin when cultures meet. Not exactly what your game is looking for (impression from a quick browse), but still... anthropology! Definitely a "want to try" kind of game. (Yes, I have MLWM).

Here's something to add near the end, right after the section on Getting Information. My thought is that this will help develop the village and the tribe in a way that comes directly from play and fits well with the rules as they stand, without a lot of GM imposition or whatever. It might also help develop the Alienation thing, because over time the players themselves are going to get more and more Alienated from this situation; a few of them may start to "get it," and start manipulating these structures to advantage their characters, in which case they will develop Rapport increasingly rapidly. Either way, my thinking is that this encourages the players to riff off what weirdness they've been seeing in the tribe, which pushes them toward more rapport and either high or low Alienation, depending.

I'm still unclear on how Lévi-Strauss's Empathy poisons the Tupi-Kawahib, though.

Developing the Tupi-Kawahib

It’s important that before the game begins, you all know nothing whatever about the Tupi-Kawahib except that they’re genuinely “primitive” and they live deep in the forest. A few points can and should be set in advance, in discussion, but most of the initial setup of the village and the tribe should arise from the construction of Lévi-Strauss and his informants.

Whatever Lévi-Strauss Needs must actually be available in the village. If he needs ritual masks and knives, they must exist. If he needs to see ritual warfare and cannibalism, the tribe must actually do this. From this you can draw further inferences, which may or may not be made explicit.

The nature of the Less than Savages will construct more information, on similar principles. What clear from such things is what is important in Tupi-Kawahib society. For example, it’s true that all the various tribes in the region know a lot about local birds, but not all of them consider this central to their culture. If an informant knows a lot about local flora and fauna but nothing about birds, then we know for sure that the Tupi-Kawahib care a great deal about birds. If that’s the case, then many of their decorations will be bird-shaped, and will use lots of feathers and eggshells, and their myths will talk about the various bird-spirits, and so on. The point is that you design the tribe backwards from what the informants are bad at; this makes their Less than Savages crippling.

A few things will help set up the tribe as sufficiently complicated and intricate that it really isn’t possible for Lévi-Strauss ever to figure it all out without an enormous amount of help.

The tribe is divided into moieties, a couple of major blocks that indicate kinship and residence locations. Assume at least two moieties and no more than four. If you want, roll a d4 and ignore 1s. Every tribesman is absolutely identified with one moiety. Members of one moiety may never marry.

The tribe is divided into clans, kinship blocks that indicate who can and cannot marry and the like. Assume at least eight clans; more than fifteen is probably too difficult to keep track of, though there are tribes out there with more than fifty. If you want, roll a d8 and add 7. Every member of the tribe is absolutely identified with one clan, but there is no correlation between clan membership and moiety membership. Members of the same clan may never marry—this is incest.

Every clan and every moiety has an animal, plant, mineral, manufactured object, or bird totem. These are all completely different. You don’t have to come up with them at the start; make them up as you go along. Do not have all of them be of the same type; the system should be apparently incoherent. Whatever seems most important to the natives, which we identified above from the Less than Savages and Lévi-Strauss’s Needs (e.g. birds, etc.) should be dominant wherever possible. So if we know that ritual implements, birds, and flowers are important, then the moieties should be something like Axe, Eagle, Orchid, Pipe; the clans should be something like Tent, Sandstone, Swallow, Lily, Moccasin, Sloth, Heron, Daisy, Water, Vine, Fire-Pit. Make them very specific.

The tribe is either matrilineal or patrilineal, meaning that clan identification stems from one parent’s identity. Pick one.

The tribe is either uxorilocal or virilocal, meaning that upon marriage the husband moves in with the wife’s family or vice-versa, respectively. Pick one.

Bear the lineality and locality in mind as you go about inventing NPCs, so that you can have people interrelated as and how seems appropriate—which will generate horrendously complicated kinship situations.

The physical layout of the village is such that all the moieties are distinct. This might be in a circle divided in an appropriate number of wedges, or a line of moiety-identified circles, or whatever weird thing you come up with. Clan identity is not marked this way.

Somewhere there is a men’s longhouse and a women’s longhouse, much separated. Members of the opposite sex may never enter them. Prepubescent children may never enter them, except as babes in arms. The women’s longhouse might be way outside the village, or across the stream, and when the women start menstruating they might have to go there (not necessary, but common).

On the outskirts of the village lives at least one witch-doctor, shaman, or priest, of whatever sex. If there is more than one, they may be of both sexes. They live separately. Their huts are only entered at special invitation. They do not apparently have clan or moiety identity. Most of the important ritual implements are in these people’s huts. There should not be the same number of such people as there are moieties, nor should there be more than five of them. They should have very distinct functions and proprietary rituals, but these functions are only known to those who know a great deal about the tribe—thus you don’t need to design them in advance.

There is at least one chief, and no more than the number of moieties minus one. Each chief rules in some fashion or other, but if there are multiple chiefs it shouldn’t immediately be clear what their respective jobs might be.

The priests (or whatever) and chiefs are all mutually responsible for ensuring that there are no violations of anything prohibited. There is at least some conflict among such people about this, but it shouldn’t be clear what about or why.

Now as you go along, you will find a need for clan and moiety names, special prohibitions, ritual acts and implements, masks, jewelry, and so on. Make these up from nothing, but write them down as you go. When you need a myth, make it as bizarre as you can, with no obvious point or meaning. It should include at least three of the clan/moiety names, as characters or implements. There is no need to be consistent from myth to myth; that is, Sloth can be a great and virtuous person in one myth and an incestuous horror in another.

Every time a character violates a taboo or the like, almost always as a result of his Less than Savage, write down the taboo.

Remember that Lévi-Strauss knows everything that happens. The informants may try to hide things from him—for example, an informant may not want to admit that when saying a pleasant “good morning” to a young lady, her brother ran up and started swearing at him because she is of the Daisy clan and he (the informant) of the Moccasin clan—but Lévi-Strauss knows this now anyway.

Now here’s the hard part.

The GM needs to keep an eye on all this stuff and use it to generate new commands. It’s not that Lévi-Strauss necessarily wants his informants to violate taboos, but these things interest him immensely and he wants to know how they work. If he now knows that Daisy and Moccasin are under some circumstances a tabooed contact, he still needs to know whether this is moiety-related and whether it is sexually invertible. So he might command this same informant to ask for a pair of sacred moccasins (you may not have previously known there were such things, but now there are) in order to see whether this is a violation of taboo. He might order his informant to ask a woman of his Moccasin clan over to dinner—and invite a male Daisy as well. If the female Daisy was of the Axe moiety and the Moccasin informant of the Eagle moiety, he might require another informant who is also an Axe (and a Heron) to go make sexual overtures to an Eagle-moiety Daisy.

Now you have no idea at that point whether these things are also taboo or not; it depends on how the scene and the rolls come out. The nice thing is that you have so many variables to play with that you are very unlikely ever to run out of options, especially if not everything you make the informants do is about kinship or totemic identity.

In between sessions, sit down with the list of known information and produce some sort of weird structure of things. Don’t take everything, just a few. Lay out a list of elements, say about eight or so, in a column. To the right of this column, write down a list of every element to which each one of these is known to be opposed, and then to the right of that put another list of every element to which each is known to be allied. Use every incident, event, or object that comes to hand, no matter how trivial. If someone mentioned that the female Daisy of the Axe moiety had a necklace of jaguar teeth, you write down that Daisy is allied to female, axe, jaguar, and tooth. We already know that Daisy is opposed to male, moccasin, eagle, morning (because of the “good morning”).

Now generate a ritual or a myth on this basis. Take two or three elements from each line, not necessarily including the one on the left, and make it Step One. Go to the next line, choose random elements, and make it Step Two, and so on through the list, keeping alliances and oppositions.

If it’s a myth, you might start with the female jaguar who killed an eagle.

If it’s a ritual, you might start with the male performer, wearing an eagle headdress, burning an axe-handle in the ceremonial fire-pit.

Next session, this myth or ritual should be told or performed at some point during play.

Remember, it doesn’t have to make any apparent sense whatsoever. Leave that up to Lévi-Strauss! The point is that you are generating a great deal of complexity and intricacy to this society out of absolutely nothing.

Optionally, if an informant makes use of these established structures in a way that seems plausible and involves at least four elements, for example if the male Moccasin (Eagle) “realizes” (i.e. announces) that he can make successful sexual overtures to a female Heron (Axe) because Heron and Daisy are strongly opposed when within the same moiety, you can give him a bonus to his roll to make an overture:

Informant (Reason plus 1 minus Alienation) vs.
Connection (Empathy minus Reason)

This means that the informant is more likely to make a positive emotional bond if he really understands intellectually how things work.

Oh, by the bye...

In the previous thread, a number of suggestions were made. I haven't, in the main, incorporated them here. This isn't because I don't like them, but because I thought it made more sense to put together one coherent version and then make changes at a secondary stage. The basic suggestions were:

1. Levi-Strauss needs development mechanics of some kind. (Jonathan Walton)

2. Make Levi-Strauss essentially not a GM character; move to a GM-less version in which Levi-Strauss is a PC built on a variant of the informant rules. (Piers Brown)

3. When evidence is presented to Levi-Strauss, he makes a roll:

Reason+Alienation vs.
Empathy+Nostalgia vs.
A number of d10 chosen by the informant

If Reason wins over Empathy, L-S analyzes the evidence in rational terms, and if not he "gets" it more emotionally. If L-S wins (either roll) he gains +1 to the appropriate trait, and if he loses he loses 1. If either score drops to 0, L-S leaves the tribe without any endgame. The theory is that the players try to keep this balanced because they need L-S around. (Eero Tuovinen)

----
My own thinking is that I want to keep Levi-Strauss as simple as possible so as to retain focus on the PC informants in complex opposition to him. The difficulty, you see, is that compared to MLwM, Levi-Strauss isn't actually evil -- he's just weird and different, and what he wants and needs is really somewhat at odds with the society.

What I'd like to see is some development of a mechanic such that it's clear how and why L-S's Empathy is destructive to the society. This is The Horror Revealed, but somehow made more subtle. In an ideal case, The Horror Revealed would happen organically, not as an invention; somehow the way L-S's Empathy interacts with the informants' Alienation and Nostalgia actually prompts these horrors directly, i.e. as exact parallels.

The only way I can see to do this is some kind of way of structuring those Horror Revealed moments such that they exactly and rigidly follow the structures of the scene that prompted it and the command that prompted the scene. But I don't quite see how that works.

One cool thing would be if there is some precise relationship between the informant's (the one who prompts the Horror Revealed thing) More and Less Than qualities and the horror that manifests, in the sense that if the informant knows nothing about plants, the Horror Revealed somehow manifests a decline in native knowledge of plants. But I don't see how to do this cleanly.

I look forward to comments....

clehrich wrote:
So here's a link:
Levi-Strauss in Amazonia PDF

1. Currently, it's not clear enough why Levi-Strauss's Empathy is poisonous to the society. We see that it's destructive to the informants, but it's much more important that it be an ugly undercurrent in the whole scenario.

2. I'm not convinced that the endgame options for Levi-Strauss make sense in the terms pose.

3. I don't think it's clear what sorts of things Levi-Strauss might command, other than stealing stuff. More importantly, it's not clear what Levi-Strauss is actually doing with all this material he's gathering, nor how that affects gameplay. I think that's very important, but I can't see quite how to do it.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Especially the Levi-Strauss creation .... Levi-Strauss is Levi-Strauss, and all these and more are his aspects. Whether he will develop a comprehensive theory on cannibalism or ritual instruments or tribal lesbianism in the game, there's no thematic reason at all for limiting it beforehand. Rather, Claude is already a defined Master in MLwM terms, all that's needed are some player characters.

Consider two examples:
1. The Informants have never gained access to the ritual hut of the Moon man, wherein young boys disappear time to time. Now it's revealed that the savages castrate boys for ritual reasons in the hut.
2. A tribal hunter comes back from the trail completely drunk, telling that a white trading post only a week's journey to the east trades with cheap whiskey.

These are different things thematically, and both should be given mechanical representations. "Horror" is the wrong word, as this is not a game about horror, but about culture.

He insists on seeing the savages as human, and it's his conviction we should attack with the type 1 horror.

The way it should work is that Empathy causes the type 1 Horrors you see there, and Reason causes type 2. Just give them different formulas, if nothing else.

The problem I'm seeing is that there's not enough structure given. I suggest taking a look at a new concept, namely the endgame options for the tribe. Suppose that the events of the game affect their fate as well as the fate of Levi-Strauss and his informants. List possible futures.

Thus a subsystem for research is called for, one that handles the Levi-Strauss research as well as the on-going tribe creation. Like the myth creation guidelines (pure genius by the way; I'll be stealing that one for some project) you give, but immersed into the rules in a meaningful way.

As for the exact things that Levi-Strauss will go for, don't limit the GM by any Needs or Wants. Those are fixed, and the actual orders will range all over the place. Apart from stealing things, they can be about acting as his translator (interesting in itself) and explaining him stuff. Actually, I find the division between Violence and Villainy quite useless in this context, and would prefer other means of giving choices for the players.

About the two types of Horror: we're clearly using different viewpoint characters when analyzing the Reason/Empathy divide; I was thinking that horror over the inhumanity of the tribe is only possible if Levi-Strauss (that is, the players) has invested in seeing them as human. If there is no empathy, then it doesn't matter to Levi-Strauss (and the players) whether the savages eat their young or not.

Anyway, your ordering works too. It's all in the interpretation.

About the legend/ritual creation system: don't sell yourself short, it's genius. Especially the part about how the same memes can be interpreted as a ritual or a myth, and how the GM should construct and introduce these on the symbolic metalevel. Might be basic for an anthropologist, but I've never encountered it before.

clehrich wrote:

Thus a subsystem for research is called for, one that handles the Levi-Strauss research as well as the on-going tribe creation. Like the myth creation guidelines (pure genius by the way; I'll be stealing that one for some project) you give, but immersed into the rules in a meaningful way.

Feel free to steal it, of course -- it wasn't that tricky. But what I do not see is how to connect this to the rules in a meaningful way. I mean, that's what bogged me down hard the last time, and I'm still stuck there. Any suggestions, anyone?

Again, I agree that the violence/villainy thing isn't necessarily helpful here, but I'm not seeing enough potential options. I guess I'm having a bit of a creative block: what else might the informants be ordered to do that puts them in a very difficult bind, serves Levi-Strauss, and also potentially threatens the tribe? I think if I had a wider list that would get me going.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: About the legend/ritual creation system: don't sell yourself short, it's genius. Especially the part about how the same memes can be interpreted as a ritual or a myth, and how the GM should construct and introduce these on the symbolic metalevel. Might be basic for an anthropologist, but I've never encountered it before.

Thus a subsystem for research is called for, one that handles the Levi-Strauss research as well as the on-going tribe creation. ....
I'll come back to this later on. I'm seeing this as the actual meat of the design, essentially replacing the Master creation of MLwM. But now's not the time, too busy.

A quick hit and run note: as far as design theory is concerned, the Violence/Villainy divide is about player choice doing formalized impact on the chassis of the rules. It's not about the kind of mission as you seem to be chasing, but about the way the mission is accomplished. It's there to let the players affect point spread in the stats, and to tie that player effect into the theme in a meaningful way.

As for possible divides, think of the interaction. Is there really a meaningful thematic difference between the informant hitting a villager and him stealing something from her hut? I think not. ... I could well imagine how stealing would be just as awful and indistinguishable from violence for the villagers here.

Then again, when considering alternatives, I'm hard put to come up with any right now.

So I have a lovely (sort of) example of tragedy at work in Levi-Strauss in Amazonia. My only concern is that players will have trouble making this sort of stuff up on the fly. Let me know what you think -- warning, this is hard, earthy stuff, and R-rated.

----
Lévi-Strauss is very interested that unmarried women seem to engage in lesbian sex-acts across clans but within moieties. The clans seem irrelevant, but it’s hard to know for sure; he’s pretty confident they never do this outside of moiety. Over breakfast, he asks Nutali, a female informant, to convince the young ladies of her Axe moiety to pay a visit. Nutali suspects he is interested in this lesbianism, which she considers exclusively a female concern and inappropriate for Lévi-Strauss to know about. Here’s Nutali:

Nutali grew up in a Tupi-Kawahib village, albeit not this one, and had just gotten married (aged 16) when a bunch of half-breed bandits came raiding. They shot most of the men, and kidnaped the women and children to sell into slavery. Nutali ended up in a sleazy brothel in Rio, but she escaped, cutting her pimp’s throat and heading into the bush. She got a little work at a missionary hospital near the Bororo settlements, where she improved her Portuguese and learned a lot of basic medical knowledge. She also learned to cook from the Bororo women, having never done this herself at home because her mother and sister were very good cooks and she never set up her own household.

Meeting Lévi-Strauss at the hospital, she decided to join with him and return to her own people at last.

More than White: modern field-surgical ability, except that she cannot set bones.
Less than Savage: ignorant of all local plants, except for cooking herbs.
Rapport:0 Alienation: 2 Nostalgia: 1
Empathy is 5 and Reason is 3.

The player decides that Nutali will resist. So Nutali, with Rapport 0 minus Nostalgia 1 will roll one d4 in her effort to resist Lévi-Strauss’s command. The GM, on behalf of Lévi-Strauss, rolls Empathy 5 plus Nutali’s Alienation of 2, a total of 7d4, and gets three 4s, which are discarded, one 3, two 2s and one 1, for a total of 8. Nutali’s player rolls a 4, which is discarded, so her total is 0. And Nutali heads off to the women’s longhouse.

After dealing with other players, the GM frames Nutali into the women’s longhouse, where a bunch of young women are giggling excitedly in the corner.

The player decides to go for the Desperation die. Nutali joins the conversation and makes a kind of mild overture to getting them to talk about ritual lesbianism on the ground that it’s girl-talk. Then, as soon as the conversation comes around, “Girls, you have to help me, please! The white man says you have to go talk to him, all together but with no men around, and I’m scared that he’ll beat me if you don’t go. Please! I don’t want to be beaten! He scares me!” Now the player gets 7 d4 (5+2) and 1 d6 vs. 3 d4. Note that this is Communication, because Nutali is trying to manipulate the girls into going to talk to Lévi-Strauss about their sex-lives.

The girls sneer at her weakness, but agree to go. The GM, after reminding the player to increase Alienation, now cuts to other players.
Once all the other players’ scenes have been dealt with, the GM cuts back to Nutali’s player. “Okay, so we’ve got a whole bunch of the Axe moiety girls planning to meet at Lévi-Strauss’s hut. Anything in particular you want, or do we just run with it?”

“Yes, I’d like one of the girls to be Junakiri, a Connection of Nutali’s, who’s of the Eagle clan where I’m from the Sloth clan. Before we go to talk to Lévi-Strauss, I want a scene where I can make an overture—we know they do this stuff, right?”

“Oh, that kind of overture. Okay. So how about you go picking herbs together?”

“Well, only if they’re cooking herbs, right?”

“Oh yeah, your Less than Savage. Okay, so you go off into the forest to pick some cooking herbs, no problem.”

They now roleplay a scene in which the two chatter as they pick herbs, then stop for a snooze in a cozy, sunny nook under a tree.

“I tell her how charming she is, and what a wonderful wife she’ll make. I tell her about my best friend from my old village, and how we used to do everything together.”

Dice are thrown: 3-3 (Alienation is up one) vs. 5-3. The GM wins.

“Junakiri leaps to her feet. ‘How can you!’ she shouts, tears running down her face. ‘You, you.... I thought we were friends!’ She runs off into the forest, crying piteously. Raise your Alienation and Rapport by one each.”

“Um, this doesn’t mean they won’t go talk to Lévi-Strauss, does it?”

“No, but I think you may have lost a friend here.”

The GM now cuts to the other players in turn, and then comes back to Nutali’s player. “You ready for the Lévi-Strauss scene?”

“Sure. No problem.”

“Okay, so you come into the hut and he’s set the scene comfortably. He gives them good food they like—lots of sweets and such—and he gives them each their choice of a set of brightly-colored beads. Then he asks you to do some translating. And he starts serving some hoarded rum.”

“Well, this is a little freaky, but I translate.”

They roleplay the scene for a bit. The girls get pretty tipsy. Lévi-Strauss has Nutali swing the conversation deftly toward the desired subject.

The GM says, “Suddenly, Junakiri starts shouting. ‘It’s you again! How can you? It’s disgusting! This man is a monster!’ Lévi-Strauss clearly picks up the gist of her remark, and orders you to talk her down. Do you resist?”

“No, I guess not. It’s bad for me if I don’t do it anyway. Okay, so I start explaining to her. ‘Junakiri, please, look at me. I didn’t mean that, not then in the forest. That’s what he wants, you know that, but that’s not me. I was just talking, just girls, just remembering when I was a kid in my own village. Juna, please, don’t you trust me? You know I’m not like that. I was supposed to be a married woman, you know that? It’s not what you think, please, please believe me.”

This is pretty clearly a Sincerity ploy, and it’s not bad, so it’s Empathy plus Alienation plus a d8 against Reason, or 5+4+d8 vs. 3, an easy win. But that means that Alienation will go up one more, to 5, making Alienation greater than Rapport (1) plus Reason (3), so this triggers Tristes Tropiques. Alienation doesn’t go up. Alienation plus Reason (8) is greater than Nostalgia (1) plus Empathy (5), so it’s a scene of Savagery. Junakiri sits down silently and the scene cuts:

Nutali’s player narrates:

“Meanwhile, in the women’s longhouse outside the village, where the menstruating women all go so as not to violate purity taboos and bring down the wrath of the giant snake Boriga’orinaya, two old friends have a long conversation. They realize that their old relationship as girls, about which everyone joked, has never really ended. But now they cannot behave in this fashion, because they would be violating marital purity. After much discussion, they conclude that there is only one appropriate resolution. Despite their impurity, they approach the witch-doctor and explain the situation, then the two hand over their infant children. The witch-doctor, after cross-questioning them intensively, recognizes the justice of their claim. He brings a stone axe from his hut and sets out two Brazil nuts, one for each marriage. Each woman takes the axe in turn and smashes one nut. Then the witch-doctor takes a thick stalk of the piyakuro vine, cuts a length about 10 inches long, and hands it to the older woman, who rubs its end to raise the slimy juice and inserts it into her vagina about an inch. The witch-doctor now rips her clothing off and sends her, vine-penis held in place in one hand, to bathe in the river. She returns, still holding on, thereby proving her masculinity. The witch-doctor asks once more if she is certain, and she nods, holding back tears. The witch-doctor, with a shrug of resignation, raises the axe and brings it down powerfully, smashing the head of the woman’s baby. The woman bursts into tears, but holds onto the vine-penis, and is embraced by her weeping lover—now his wife.”

Note here the use of plants (about which the informant, remember, knows nothing except for cooking herbs) and the connection of the Savage act to the story at hand.

Lévi-Strauss has learned a lot about ritual lesbianism, but at what cost?

ATTENTION!

Paul and I have discussed this draft, and I think he is correct in saying that it's just a little too close, prose-wise, for comfort. Until it is rather more revised, in my own language, it should not be distributed or available.

Therefore I have asked my web host to take it down. Please, under no circumstances distribute this game!

Oh -- and please DO NOT reply to this particular post. The thread is one thing, but not this post. This is not something to discuss or argue about.

For those who care (both of you), I am continuing to work on revising this game, and when it is done it will sound a lot less like Paul and a lot more like me, which is probably unfortunate from a prose perspective but there you go.

Any questions about this should go to me directly, by PM. Don't bug Paul about it, okay?

(As far as I understand Forge etiquette it's allright for me just to say that...)

I, for one, am following this thread with a lot of interest, even though I don't have all that much to comment on. I'd definitely like to see this game reach a finished version!

Eero Tuovinen wrote:
Thus a subsystem for research is called for, one that handles the Levi-Strauss research as well as the on-going tribe creation. Like the myth creation guidelines you give, but immersed into the rules in a meaningful way.

A rules subsystem that tells us how it goes with Levi-Strauss's research and what behaviour the tribe will evidence next. Make it one system, make the stats used in the game affect the subsystem, and give players ways to affect it's working, but let only the GM know the exact state of the system.

Chris Lechrich wrote:
Oh. Um, well, what you need to do is read The Savage Mind. I stole it from Levi-Strauss, you see. Of course, his version is much, much more complicated, but nevertheless it's his.

Hi Eero,

First of all, let me make clear that I continue to work on this beast, and that there have been a number of significant changes since the last version. I need to get it into a preliminary form that Paul and I can be happy about, which I can then post for direct comment and criticism. But I want to update you on what I’ve done. In another post, I’ll respond to your suggestions directly.

Incidentally, on rereading a block of Tristes Tropiques I note that, like many readers (including some famous ones), I misremembered the tribe in question. They called themselves the Mundé, and nobody knows who they were so far as I know. They must have been related to one of the three major linguistic-cultural groups around, but we don’t even know that much.

Empathy and Reason

A point now strongly emphasized is that these are two-way streets. The more Empathy Lévi-Strauss develops for the Mundé, the more they are able to understand him emotionally as well. This has two effects. On the one hand, it makes the Mundé want to deal with Lévi-Strauss directly and avoid using the informants as mediators. On the other hand, it makes the Mundé start to be like Lévi-Strauss in some respects, which is to say Lévi-Strauss’s Empathy taints the culture.

Reason is an alienating intellectual comprehension. The more Lévi-Strauss develops this, the more inhuman and unfamiliar the Mundé begin to seem. On the other hand, Reason also allows them to communicate with him by structural symbolic means, which does not taint their culture but does put the informants more strongly into the Lévi-Strauss camp.

The Anthropologist

Lévi-Strauss is now not something you develop as such. He’s who he is. Now one point about this is that he’s magnetic, obviously terrifyingly intelligent, and he represents a whole host of possibilities to the Mundé. On the one hand, the Mundé are afraid that if he sees too much, he will condemn them and call on the Brazilian authorities to enslave or exterminate them. On the other, they believe that if they can appropriate some white techniques and qualities and put them to good use, they will gain leverage for surviving the encroaching onslaught of white culture. Thus they want to understand him in terms of both Empathy and Reason. The more they are able to do this, which is indicated by the same numbers (that is, Empathy marks both the Mundé’s perspective on Lévi-Strauss and the reverse), the less they really need the informants. But this means that, like Lévi-Strauss, they are using the informants.

The Question

Lévi-Strauss has a Question, an anthropological problem he wants to solve. It could be more or less anything, but it’s important that its solution will in some ways damage the Mundé. For example, if the question is about ritual cannibalism, the solution will require the Mundé to perform ritual cannibalism, in which case at least somebody dies and there is the possibility that the Brazilian authorities will find out about it and want to exterminate or enslave the Mundé. This question thus damages the Mundé by its nature. For example again, if the question is about masks and their uses, Lévi-Strauss will have to actually take these masks with him; he doesn’t necessarily have to steal them – he’d much rather not – but even if the Mundé give him their masks they will not, by definition, be able entirely to replace them. This question does not in principle require damage to the Mundé, but because it is the Question in this game we determine that it requires damage. Thus the point of the question is that although it may be a perfectly reasonable anthropological issue, we know in advance that (1) it is in some sense important to the Mundé and (2) its solution will necessarily damage the Mundé at some level. Note that Lévi-Strauss does understand this; it’s part of the tragedy of ethnography.

Designing the Mundé

With the Question and the characters designed, we set some baselines for the Mundé. Basically the principle is sort of like how the Question was formulated. Whatever Less than Savage and More than White qualities have been defined, these determine certain issues and emphases for the Mundé culture. So for example if one character’s Less than Savage is “Knows nothing about local flora except for cooking herbs,” then we know immediately that the Mundé are very into botany. If one character’s More than White is “Can defeat any man in single combat, unless naked,” then we know that single combat is important to the Mundé and that there are certain occasions on which such combat is performed nude. Similarly, if the Question is about ritual masks and their uses, we know that the Mundé put a lot of stock in their masks: they are the most important ritual implements.

Beyond this, a few baseline points have to be set, or we get chaos. These are just points that the informants ought to know anyway, like how many moieties there are and what the clans are and where the women’s longhouse is and stuff like that. These things are determined randomly or arbitrarily by the group. What is not set at all is what any of these things mean.

The Communication Triad

In MLwM, you had Violence, Villainy, and (overtures to) Love. What I’ve figured out is that these things are really ways of communicating, and so I’ve replaced them with a triad of communications: Taboo, Communication, (overture to) Rapport.

Basically Rapport hasn’t changed from Love; it’s an attempt to communicate at a level that sets aside the cultural and goes for the human. Touching, smiling, etc. are what we have in mind. Obviously these are culturally conditioned, though, and so you can fail, in which case your Alienation goes up – but so does your Rapport. The point is that your message has been understood, that is you communicated successfully, but you have realized that you aren’t even capable of dealing with people you care about on an emotional level because you’re such a social cripple, so deeply not-Mundé.

Taboo and Communication are sort of like Violence and Villainy, but with a weird twist. In both, you are speaking for Lévi-Strauss, that is trying to prosecute some inquiry he’s put into motion. So suppose you want to convince the shaman that he should give or sell you some mask. You are necessarily trying to manipulate the situation to achieve some end, and that end is Lévi-Strauss’s, which (because of the Question) necessarily means that it is ultimately destructive of the Mundé. But you’re trying to do this through straight-up Communication, not getting dangerous or committing crime. If you succeed, you have just shown yourself that you are willing and able to manipulate your own people on behalf of Lévi-Strauss, in which case your Alienation goes up. If you fail, your request (or whatever) is refused and that’s an end of it. That doesn’t alienate you, because anyone can ask for something and receive a polite refusal. In either case you have communicated your meaning successfully.

When you decide to up the ante and commit a crime—theft, violence, etc.—what you’re doing is violating Taboo. Here’s where the whole thing gets strange. Let’s say you decided to steal the mask, right? Suppose you fail: your Nostalgia goes up, because you encounter the situation as a devious henchman of Lévi-Strauss and see the Mundé respond as decent, likeable people in some sense, making you wish you were more like them. But suppose you succeed. Your Alienation goes up, but there are two possible reasons for this. If Empathy is higher than Reason, then your Alienation goes up because you have violated Taboo and committed a crime against the Mundé. If Reason is higher than Empathy, then your Alienation goes up because it turns out you haven’t violated Taboo at all, and you don’t know where you stand. For example, you get caught stealing the mask but the shaman appears complacent about it; for some reason what you’ve done is perfectly licit under these circumstances—but you have no idea why. Alienation time.

The Bonus Triad

In MLwM, you’ve got Intimacy, Desperation, and Sincerity as ways of getting bonuses to your rolls. These are all predicated on emotional concerns, which fits that game but doesn’t fit this one so well. What we need instead is more communication — but this time through symbols.

Basically what you do is play with those rituals and myths we’ve been constructing along the way, and you more or less announce that because you’re a Bear and she’s an Eagle and your father was a Crow and you’re carrying the sacred war-pipe, therefore she’ll respond positively to your overture. You’re supposed to cobble this together out of material largely already given, but you also make some of it up, generating more material to play with next time around.

If you do this in private, one-on-one, you get d4. If you do it semi-publicly, let’s say with one family or group of friends, you get d6. If you do it really publicly, in front of everybody (more or less), you get d8. Basically you’re taking greater risks with your own status. Lévi-Strauss thus can’t get the d8 because his status is never that much on the line—he’s never going to be one of the Mundé, no matter what, and he’s in a sense a public figure among them, which is to say whatever he does is a topic for public conversation. So there is no difference between dealing with a small group and working publicly for him, and his status as the White Anthropologist isn’t really ever going to change anyway.

Tristes Tropiques

So the thing I like best in this revision is this here, which replaces “The Horror Revealed.” Basically it’s the same triggering situation and the same narration of an off-screen event, but what it reveals depends. You roll Alienation + Reason against Nostalgia + Empathy. If the former wins, what happens is Savagery. If the latter wins, what happens is Colonialism.

Basically Savagery is where the Mundé go and do something that the scene makes clear is quite obvious to them, if not necessarily ordinary, that provokes a strong negative moral response in the players. Almost certainly it’s violent: infanticide, cannibalism, fratricide, etc. It occurs as a result of a specific situation and is accepted as appropriate and even desirable by the Mundé.

Colonialism is where the Mundé demonstrate that they are losing their culture. They fail to do something they would usually do, or someone violates a major taboo (such as incest) and it is emphatically not seen as appropriate, etc. The loss has to matter, as well; for example, because the hunting party are losing track of their native botany, they use the wrong herb as a poultice on someone’s leg-injury and he’ll be partly crippled for life.

Savagery and Colonialism should also have something thematically to do with the Less than Savage or More than White of the triggering informant.

When Savagery occurs, increase Reason by one; when Colonialism occurs, increase Empathy by one. Basically when Savagery happens, the empathetic shock to Lévi-Strauss throws him further into abstraction and a kind of moral relativism: well, cannibalism is okay because it’s a logical solution to a problem we handle through prison, so it’s just anthropophagy instead of anthropoemy (vomiting people), etc. When Colonialism happens, Lévi-Strauss feels a deep sense of loss and tragedy: he can see that he has done damage by his very presence.

I like most of what I've read on this thread so far. It's fascinating and I'm sure it will result in a very unique game despite all it owes to MLwM. I can't wait to see what you end up with.

clehrich wrote: In MLwM, you’ve got Intimacy, Desperation, and Sincerity as ways of getting bonuses to your rolls. These are all predicated on emotional concerns, which fits that game but doesn’t fit this one so well. What we need instead is more communication — but this time through symbols....If you do this in private, one-on-one, you get d4. If you do it semi-publicly, let’s say with one family or group of friends, you get d6. If you do it really publicly, in front of everybody (more or less), you get d8.

John,

I'm not entirely comfortable with it either, to tell the truth. Here's my thinking.

First, a practical point. Having read a lot of MLwM Actual Play threads, I notice that these dice aren't used all that much a lot of the time. I realize that they should be, and are a core mechanic, but in fact a lot of really intense narrative gaming seems to happen without them. That tells me that a slight bend in the system here will not produce drastically negative effects -- anyway, that's my guess.

Second, I am having trouble explaining it well -- in the revision and in the thread. My concept is sort of halfway between how you're reading it (which is I think more or less how I said it) and what's there in MLwM.

The idea is that when you communicate with other people, you do so always through symbols. But the thing is, you communicate, at base, because you want something -- especially to be understood. The idea is that failure to communicate is really quite harrowing for the informants. It's a fact of life for Levi-Strauss, and the source of his whole method, but for them it's a mark of their alienation from their own culture. When they communicate for themselves, making overtures to Rapport, they want to be understood as people, not just as communicators. They want to be understood as human, which for the Munde means as Munde.

Now a lot of that symbolic mucking about is stuff that to the Munde is quite obvious. If you're coming on to a Rabbit Clan girl, and you're from the Lizard Clan, it's quite obvious that you offer her jewelery. You don't offer her food -- you're a Lizard, stupid. But of course that means nothing to us, the players, so we're as alienated from all this as is Levi-Strauss.

And that's the bind I'm in. I can't see how to get out of it. At the crux, the most important moment, the player is displaced. The most important defining moment should be when the informant makes a play for Rapport in public. Everything is on the line: he's gambling his whole status, his whole identity in fact. And if the girl smiles shyly and takes the pretty necklace, then dances off to show her admiring friends, the informant is like Pinocchio: he's become a real live boy.

But the problem is that the players have to do this somehow in symbols, and those are arbitrary, created in play, and the whole system is totally alien to us.

So my idea was to use dice, but I admit it's a bad solution. The emotional heft of the game should lie in a kind of partial immersion, an ability of the player to really "get" the problem of the informant. And I see how that works negatively, where alienation and nostalgia are built, but somehow it's breaking down hard when we get to the positive.

The way it ends up now, let's suppose the player announces that he's going to use jewelery because he's a Lizard and she's a Rabbit and blah blah. All made up. He rolls dice, ta da, he wins, so I guess it turns out that that was the cool thing to do. So the informant is now human, but the player is just rolling dice. If he'd rolled differently, the jewelery would have been a bad move. There's no real system here; it's all fake.

And so I'm stuck. I don't think simply restoring the original MLwM system will solve this. One version I had used both systems at once, and you had this thing with doubled dice and whatnot, but that seemed very crunchy and not at all the point.

I am convinced that there is an elegant, Paul Czege-style mechanic that will solve this problem, but I can't find it. Not yet, anyway. I'm too stuck in how the anthropologist thinks, I suspect.

Any ideas?

clehrich wrote: First, a practical point. Having read a lot of MLwM Actual Play threads, I notice that these dice aren't used all that much a lot of the time. I realize that they should be, and are a core mechanic, but in fact a lot of really intense narrative gaming seems to happen without them. That tells me that a slight bend in the system here will not produce drastically negative effects -- anyway, that's my guess.

clehrich wrote: The idea is that failure to communicate is really quite harrowing for the informants...The most important defining moment should be when the informant makes a play for Rapport in public. Everything is on the line: he's gambling his whole status, his whole identity in fact...I am convinced that there is an elegant, Paul Czege-style mechanic that will solve this problem, but I can't find it. Not yet, anyway. I'm too stuck in how the anthropologist thinks, I suspect.

Any ideas?