...Also, maybe we are thoroughly hijacking this thread and need a new one.

I would be concerned that we use a "key concept" that makes it hard to differentiate the two. That I would not want to do.

...a kinda model I have been toying with on and off would be to play a game which actually created a civilisation. Difficult to conceptualise, but with a dynastic structure, obviously the culture will accrete data and depth over time. Might be doable, I don't know yet. The mechanics would have to be structured to prompt player behaviour in this direction.

Course, another idea might be A Canticle For Leibowitz. It rides close to post-apocalypse stuff but is spread across a good thousand years IIRC; anyway it might be feasible to start at a point in the future which is sufficiently removed from the present that all the dead technology stuff is irrelevant. IIRC the story was a partial retelling of the "irish monks save civilisation in the dark ages" concept.

I think perhaps we need to refine our explicit goals. I am interested in:

1) pseudo-archeological RP, or perhaps "psycho-archeology"
2) construction of plausibly consistent environments
3) experimenting with the process of history

Mike Holmes Wrote:

Certainly. We need to pin down some basic design goals as well, however. I could just use Universalis to do a storytelling version of building a civilization (mental note: playtest that idea).

Alhough this sounding out of why? where? and how? is something I think you're best doing on your own, I am interested in chipping in with tangents, ideas and more concrete historical nuggets that you could incorporate - however you decide to go with this.

Personally, I've always focussed in on the real people. Somehow dynasties, heroes, gods and mythic archetypes don't 'take me there' but remind e more of reading books on world religions (my foible). As one of my players remarked: 'in your games, Paul, we always get to smell the shit!'

There you go ...

Well, I don't know exactly where I stand on the subject of scope, yet. One concept I was thinking of was to have the characters have a very human sort of experience, despite being from a rarefied social stratum.

Please do chime in, Paul, as well as anybody else who feels like it. I didn't start this thread to exclude you, just to separate the effort into two distinct projects.

Anyhow, one thing I'm finding in Mesopotamian religion is that they interpereted dreams as a means of augury. That gives me a lot of neat ideas. I'm considering having characters having both a dream life as well as their normal life. That way I can have both the rarefied and down to earth in the same game.

More to come.

Mike

Egyptians interpreted dreams too (remember Joseph?) - I tried to create a simple dream system once but wasn't too hot at it. I ended up writing my scenario, then creating three dreams to foreshadow three events/locations/NPCs I had included in the scenario. As characters induced dreams and had them interpreted, or did this themselves, they would receive one of my pre-written dreams. The advantage was these dreams weren't flaky - they were useful, and full of important symbolic meaning. The downside was I only had a few of these and sometimes gave out the same dream, just emphasiszing a different or more important aspect of the 'story'.

Oh dammit - I've posted a big chunk on the wrong thread, in Egypt. Could the powers that be move it over here, pretty please?

As far as the character psychology goes, I think we should firmly establish the theistic mindset in colour and structure; but I'm inclined to favour at least having go at the "strict" historical sim. In terms of pushing what sim does, and the Civ idea, some mechanism could be developed for representing cultural and economic institutions mechnaically, but "from the inside"; the object then is to mine historical information for scenario construction. Religion would have a role in informing players about the expected or appropriate social behaviours and value systems; perhaps these should be expressed mechanically through metaphysical attributes.

That big post was supposed to be here? Oh. Hmm..

Anyhow, yes, establish the Theistic mindset. One problem with using actualy Mesopotamian gods, though, is their sheer number. While some are certainly more important than others, references to over three thousand gods can be found. And they change over time. Instead of trying to have an encyclopedic listing of the gods, I'm envisioning a system whereby the players introduce the gods as they go (and they'd certainly be allowed to use the actual Mesopotamian gods; or possibly make their own).

As rulership changes from city-state to city-state, the gods can change to match. You see this most dramatically in the Babylonians using a lot of the Sumarian mythos, but changing it to suit them a bit better. For example, many of the myths that were formerly naturalistic take on a militaristic tone. It would be cool to see the drift of gods from one form to another over time, something the players could effect as rulers and people important to society.

So, how about each character getting to define a sort of Patron Deity? Not that every character is a priest, necessarily, but the diety in question should say someting about the character, and his place in society. So, I have a character that is in charge of brick making. His deity could be an Earth deity that can help or hinder the process of making bricks by ensuring that the earth used had the proper composition. Each player would then have a stat that related to the character's connection with the diety, and, therefore, how much he could rely on that dieties help. Or something like that.

We could leave the question of the in-game existence of deities open-ended. This would be interesting as it would point out how belief in a diety in such a civilization could be important (even if said deities do not exist). In that case "connection" with a deity would actually represent self-confidence, and an instinctive understanding of the shpere of influence, as well as others support of that belief. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people believe that you are connected to a war diety, they may support your decisions better. Or you can look at it as the deities actually existing.

This brings us back to the question of whether or not we want to have actual magic and supernatural elements in the game. Not just belief, but factual existence. This is a choice that should be nailed down early. I like them both. Actual existence is colorful. Simple belief in magic is interesting psychogically.

This also leads to the question of ahistoricity. How far afield do we want to go from actual history. For example, should the results of magic be limited somehow to the sorts of effects generated in myth, or theoretically produced by actual practitioners. Again, I'm tempted to leave things open-ended, but the more we do that the less we actually need to use anything from RW Mesopotamia.

What we need here is to determine why we are using Mesopotamia, specifically, and how we want to link it to the game mechanically. Because if we find very little, I'm going to advocate going to an entirely fictional setting that just focuses on the concepts of ancient life. Mithras is focusing his game on the interesting social aspects of Egypt, specifically education of the upper classes. What part of Mesopotamia is most interesting to focus on?

There are lots of aspects that fascinate me. Probably the most interesting to me is the architecture, and engineering. These things are almost always the parts of ancient civilizations that get most of my attention. What is a society like that has the centralized authority necessary to produce such monuments as the hanging gardens with such relatively limited technologies? I think that it might be interesting to design mechanics that dealt with characters and populaces in the context of their constructed environs.

Sorry, this meandered quite a bit. But there's lots of things to go over, things which should get nailed down before we get into making specific mechanics. A focused vision.

Mike

What identifies Mesopotamia? Pyramids? Cities? Chariots? River culture? No. Accessibility of gods. In Egypt common folk were not allowed into the temple or precinct - Greek style. It was a cosmic factory where rituals were performed to keep the universe ticking over. The commoners had their own culture of shrines, amulets and spells...

In Mesopotamia I believe the ziggurats were used for great public ceremonies. What is more everybody had a 'personal god' a guardian angel (maybe a lammasu or an actual god) that may or may not be the god of the city. It is alleigances to gods which gets me interested. Marduk 'owns' Babylon and it is his 'estate' the inhabitants all serfs on his land, the king his steward. But a character may have Shamash as his personal god (perhaps the character is a judge or magistrate), and maybe one day he prays to Dumuzi that his sheep prove to be fertile.

Having relationships with different gods and different spirits (as well as people) really attracts me to the setting. It attracted me to RuneQuest...

Mithras wrote:
In Mesopotamia I believe the ziggurats were used for great public ceremonies.

What is more everybody had a 'personal god' a guardian angel (maybe a lammasu or an actual god) that may or may not be the god of the city. It is alleigances to gods which gets me interested.

Having relationships with different gods and different spirits (as well as people) really attracts me to the setting. It attracted me to RuneQuest...

Hiya,

The big post which outlines one possible conceptualisation of the game resides under the Egypt thread. It's an attempt to conceive the dynastic "time slot" in which a game occurs as generated by the players and GM; check that out and let me know what you thin, anyone who's interested.

This is the beginning of the Babylonian story of how Marduk created the world. It is interesting that the "creation of the world" and the creation of cities are conflated; the begining of the city is the start of history as they conceive it.

"A holy house, a house of the gods in a holy place, had not been made, reed had not come forth, a tree had not been created,
A brick had not been laid, a brick mould had not been built,
A house had not been built, a city had not been built,
A city had not been made, a living creature had not been placed (therein).
(...)
All the lands were sea.
The spring in the sea was a water pipe.
Then Eridu was made, Esagila was built,
Esagila whose foundations Lugaldukuga laid within the Apsu.
(...)
The gods, the Annunnaki he created equal.
The holy city, the dwelling of their hearts' delight, they call it solemnly.
Marduk constructed a reed frame on the face of the waters.
He created dirt and poured it out by the reed frame.
In order to settle the gods in the dwelling of (their) hearts' delight,
He created mankind.

This from the book: "Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City" by Gwendolyn Leick. Leick goes on to discuss the material history of Mesopotamia and argues convincingly that the later Babylonian myth is substantially accurate - Eridu was the first city, contains the first structure (a squarish space with a plinth and a recess) and is the place where "kingship came down from heaven" and is later "carried off" to other cities (notably Uruk, by the city-goddess Inanna). Later, "Uruk was defeated (and) its kingship was carried of to Agade." At Akkad, a new city explicitly founded and thus without a god, king Naram-Sin becomes the city god through popular acclaim and the consent of other city gods. I think there is a definate and deliberate conflation here with the god as "genius" of the city proper.

Anyway, one approach might be the "hexapolis" of one historic period; then the gods might be the city gods and we anticipate that PC's will come from at least several cities. I imagine eachy city would have its pet heirarchy of lesser gods and spirits etc.

A temple hymn refers to "Foundation of heaven and earth, Holy of Holies Eridu Abzu, shrine, erected for its prince," - that phrase "Holy of Holies Eridu Abzu" might be used in some manner for explicit colour.

http://babel.massart.edu/~tkelley/eridu/

The question is how to do all the above, and not just make it a rehash of Aria (which claims to do many of the same things).

contracycle wrote:
Well, we are working a couple of parallel ideas really - the first is a game, and the other is a system for creating a game. But they are occurring simultaneously; I hope that exploration of Mesopotamia as a setting and the development of an appropriate mechanic would allow the extension of the mechanic to other cultures; but in each case realised directly for that culture rather than in the abstract.

This means that the final working example would have to operate on three levels:
The individual
The city as collective identity
The rest of the world

Characters should have the ability to intervene in the city as collective identity; this is where architecture and the construction of monuments enters the scene; where peace and war have relevance. Cities are the primary actors on the geopolitical stage, either individually or in concert.
Each city should have its own map; physical landscape should not be nominal or representative, but actual (even if fictional). The system should provide mechanisms by which the construction of monuments and the like are rewarded mechanically.

At the World level, a regional map describes the layout of local cities etc in relation to one another; the purpose of the map is to show interactions, such as trade routes and whatnot. Again, characters can intervene at this level, but will need City-sized assets to do so, like armies. The World level would also include external spiritual entities and whatnot.

I like that a lot. The size and magnificence of your central temple complex should affect the spiritual well being of the city. The market should affect the economics. The granary affects nutrition. Etc. A well fed motivated populace with a lot of slaves can then build more and better monuments or conquer it's neighbors. Yep, I'm all for defining play on this level, and having it affected by character actions. I think we're on the same page.

Valamir wrote:
Didn't Sid Mier already make that game? ;-)

There's alot to say here. How much time have I got? <looks at watch ... not alot>

I think that you must distinguish between what an RPG does well and what a computer game does well. Sim City/Civilization - are best played (in my opinion) as computer games (or the original boardgame which I never bought because I had no-one who would play it!). RPGs deal with roles and people. Historical RPGs with exploring the immediacies and experiences of another historical culture. In this way I think that a specific setting is by far the best way to go rather than a tool-kit approach to developing a burgeoning civilization.

That said, you have to select your period with care. Well actually, you have to select either 'mythic' or 'historical'. My preference (depending on the games I want to play) is to fictionalize some aspects of the setting to suit my approach. The ancients did this all the tme. There is no canon of Mesopotamian or Egyptian myth, it changes depending on who you are talking to (Or what city they're from!).

You could go:

1) Super-Historical. Babylon 1456 BC, Eridu 2458 BC, Uruk 2600 BC.

2) Semi-Mythologized. eg. Babylon as the First City as the Babylonians themselves saw it at creation. A fiction. But one that existed in the minds of the Babylonians (I love the idea they had that a vast anchor rope stretched from the roof of Marduk's temple, Esagila in Babylon up to the Heavens and connected the two. Imagine seeing that!). Contracycle mentioned Akkad as the first human-made city. Great! Use that. No-one knows where Akkad is, it was the centre of a fantastic empire forged by Sargon the Great - a spectacular period in human history. It's already fictionalized, the ruler mythologized, the work is done for you. Sargon and Akkad is more fantasy than Fritz Leiber!

3) Pure Mythology. The start of time. I love all three approaches - this third is my favourite. The world was created 5 years ago. Gods still walk the earth (or live with the temples they call homes). The landscape beyond Mesopotamia is still forming, bubbling, shifting, mountains are still growing, seas still filling. Humans are the very first! Eridu is the city you have to use (or Babylon for the reason I mentioned above). In this game players can encounter the very problems facing the original early peoples - desert raiders, famines, water-shortages, crime, tyranny, factional fighting, and so on.

Time up - gotta go!

As a veteran Civ player, its definately the case that there are similarities; that is not accidental. OTOH, the idea is too widespread for us to be concerned about copyright or anything IMO.

Anyway. Let me have another crack at explaining what I'm imagining:

We establish those three strata as above; these strata can be opposed of Elements. Say,
Trade Route to Egypt
Astronomy
Writing
... at the "world" or city level.

In play, as a character, you may reference these properties of the world or the city or whatever.

As regards player competition, I expect that many games will revolve around members of a given city; but I think that many players like to come from somewhere outside the immediate play area, and there might be a lot of room for playing off these relationships. In principle, I think this could handle a wide range of games - dungeon crawl (6 Uruk warriors, say) or wargame (Uruk vs. Kish vs. Akkad, say) depending on who the characters actually are. Thats the bit that is negotiated at startup - what kind of game do we actually want to play today?

Thats what I mean by both a system and an implementation. To make the dynastic model work, we need to describe the culture as mechanically manipulable. IF we can do, its probable that the same system could be transferred in abstract to other historical epochs, and realised with the appropriate culural detail.

As for the whole dynastic thing... I don't we have to determine beforehand what sort of game is played. Say the group chose, for whatever reason, chose to play a game called "The Rise and Fall of Ur". Over the course of this campaign, they may play several discrete character-lives; in Arc 1 they might be warriors, in Arc 2 the princeling children of those warriors, in Arc 3 the members of a prestigious family escaping the loot and rapine as the city burns.

In this case, the frame would establish Ur by listing its properties... say "city walls 6" or something. These could be used by players in a variety of ways; perhaps a "Trade Route to Egypt" could be used differently by the warriors and the princelings, in the above example, the former using it to justify combat skill ("I worked on the caravan") and the latter to exile political enemies - ("I have him sold to the Pharaohs - they're always in need of pyramid builders").

Obviously, sooner or later character actions are going to have an impact on the Big Picture - the construction of monuments, defenses, technical development etc etc. Seeing as the passage of time is an explicit theme, these have to be adressed mechanically in advance - hence the reuirement for a 3-strata game which is still going to be viewed primarily in the first person. To the extent that there is active gamism of the sim city variety, I would see that occurring in the metagame and primarily in the interstices between "adventures". Frex, players might specify a "construct ziggurat" option becuase of the "social stability +2" reward that applies to the city from then on; and then set a game in the first person against that backdrop.

Phew. I think the best place to start mechanically would be in the interaction between individuals and city-level social institutions like temples and so on.

Mithras wrote:
I think that you must distinguish between what an RPG does well and what a computer game does well.

1) Super-Historical. Babylon 1456 BC, Eridu 2458 BC, Uruk 2600 BC.
2) Semi-Mythologized.
3) Pure Mythology.

Mithras wrote:
culture. In this way I think that a specific setting is by far the best way to go rather than a tool-kit approach to developing a burgeoning civilization.

Holy Crossed Posts!

OK, I think that Gareth and I are on a similar wavelength, but we may have somewhat differing ideas about how long first-person play interjections might last. Or maybe not. Getting there, tho.

Mike

A-ha ... I see, that does make it clearer now. I was under the impression that you were angling to bring the stats and mechanics of the civilization to the fore, with characters somewhat in the background. And the goal of the game being cultural development. The mention of Aria didn't help!

Mmmm. I like your take on it Mike, Gareth. As long as its all in-character stuff (a la Pendragon) with the civilization being mapped out by the GM (or whoever) between games, just as you would adjust a traditional campaign. Giving stats to these campaign elements (just as I am doing in my Egypt game) then establishes plainly and simply that these attributes are changeable, and indeed can change according to the actions of the characters. And this does work best (I would imagine) by taking the long overview approach of RPing (something I don't plan on in my Egypt game, though the possibilities of picking up sons, grandsons and nephews to continue the tradition is always there. But the aim is to keep Egypt as a stable, solid foundation for games).

Mike Holmes wrote:
Does that help with picturing it? Is that the sort of thing that you were communicating Gareth?

I am GM. In the current era the problem which I have come up for the players is a massive flood which has destroyed the granary of Uruk. On top of this there are

Gareth,

"I also considered what I think is a more narrativist approach than my usual style (partly implemented in the prior discussion above) in which the players need not have characters who have a cooperative relationship. This is much shakier in my head, and I'd appreciate some narrativist input. The idea was that becuase the characters are linked by R-maps, there is a channel of communication that can be exploited in game to put those characters into direct interaction, even if they are opposed personally."

Works for me! Very well stated. I'd play.

Best,
Ron

contracycle wrote:
The only caveat I have here is that this might be discussed amongst all the participants prior to play.

Lastly, I also considered what I think is a more narrativist approach than my usual style (partly implemented in the prior discussion above) in which the players need not have characters who have a cooperative relationship.

The idea was that becuase the characters are linked by R-maps, there is a channel of communication that can be exploited in game to put those characters into direct interaction, even if they are opposed personally. Thus, one might conceivably play the King or Ur and the King of Akkad, linked by a marriage or something but engaged in a war, and then aggressively frame the game in such a way as the actual PC's get to interact. The GM's role is to get them together, not to construct plot.

Anyway, part of the idea behind the cooperative, or at least explicit, situation and setting design is partly so the GM does not have to spend time carrying out exposition as to what the problem is and why its a bad thing; the players know that directly (they can, say, look at the city datasheet or whatever) and that informs their play; it acts as the tacit, environmental acquisition of knowledge about these things on the part of the characters.

Anyway, the idea was much more of a request for comment than a full on proposal. I think Mike and I are definately on the same page, and quite probably not a lot of the rest will really come together until we start trying to construct actual rules. OTOH, anything in we can cover in conceptualisation would be a good thing, so all comments welcome IMO.

As for the Sim thing and the Narrative thing...

There is no reason I see that it can't be run as heavy Sim. Frex, the GM *could* unilaterally select the period and the premise and whatnot and give the players a totally Sim experience. In fact, I think we would have to do so in order to demontsrate the structure. The overlap arises more-or-less accidentally: by shifting to LifeTime, we need some way to regulate the determination of which scenes are played out. OTOH, I see no reason that a RealTime game could not be executed within this structure, without all the setup, or the setup carried out unilaterally.

In fact what I would expect to see is something like this: the initial games would be heavy Sim while players and GM's learn the system. In a later game, the characters are more likely to be socially significant, and hence empowered with world-realising techniques which are narratavist but legitimised in-game for non-narrativists. In the third game, everyone should be comfortable and the narrativist methods may not need in-game legitimisation.

I think what we need to do next is work on a prototype. We pick a city and start implementing stuff in its frame across the three strata, see where we get.

Hmm. We may have some trouble on GNS as, IIRC, you have ideas of its application that vary from the standard model. I'll try and stay away from specific theory as much as possible. I read a lot of the references to Narrativist techniques in your post as being Player Power related, and the result still seems pretty Sim to me. But that's fine, I like where it's going.

The thing is, then our Premise becomes something more like "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Mesopotamians".

contracycle wrote:
There is no reason I see that it can't be run as heavy Sim. Frex, the GM *could* unilaterally select the period and the premise and whatnot and give the players a totally Sim experience. In fact, I think we would have to do so in order to demontsrate the structure.

The overlap arises more-or-less accidentally: by shifting to LifeTime, we need some way to regulate the determination of which scenes are played out.

OTOH, I see no reason that a RealTime game could not be executed within this structure, without all the setup, or the setup carried out unilaterally.

In fact what I would expect to see is something like this: the initial games would be heavy Sim while players and GM's learn the system. In a later game, the characters are more likely to be socially significant, and hence empowered with world-realising techniques which are narratavist but legitimised in-game for non-narrativists. In the third game, everyone should be comfortable and the narrativist methods may not need in-game legitimisation.

I think what we need to do next is work on a prototype. We pick a city and start implementing stuff in its frame across the three strata, see where we get.

I'm not really sure I'm following where this thread is going. There seems to be a lot of discussion about Narrative components vs Simulation components that I don't see as adding a whole lot to the idea of what this game is. In fact, from where I'm sitting it seems to be muddying things up.

It seems to me that what you are going for is something along the lines of this:

Players take the role of people living in or dealing with a specific city. The city itself has attributes and in a sense is itself a character...perhaps even a more important character than any of the PCs.

A game session will revolve around a particular group of citizens/visitors/interested parties engaged in some key moment of their lives, that key moment being defined as some moment that is of importance to both the character and the city. The character's actions and resolutions in a given session will impact in some way the attributes of the city itself, makeing the city stronger or weaker based on the actions of the characters.

The characters may be princes and persons of power, but I don't see this as necessarily so. Instead even a commoner character can be used as a proxy for large portions of the population. The encounter of a common farmer whose home is raided by bandits and wife and child killed can be taken as an indicator that crime is rampant in the city and no one is safe, the character's experience being treated as an anecdote of more widespread events. The cities attributes can be adjusted accordingly. Conversely if the character manages to rally his nieghbors and drive off the bandits a different set of adjustments could be made (perhaps one that indicates a reduction in crime but an increase in the "power of the commoner"...or a decrease in the commoners reliance on the government. Either way this modification could have interesting impact on city politics for the next session.

In fact, playing persons of no great importance would be ideal for the game. Using their stories as an anecdote of what is going on in on a broader application will allow even a story about the lowest beggar to impact the overall stats of the city. Beyond this though you can really get into some nitty gritty life in the city kind of stories. The kind of things that make for wonderful short stories but would be lousy for an on going "campaign". No one is going to want to play "Logi the penniless beggar" as he panhandles his way through the streets game after game. But for a single session...even a single scene, how Logi gets treated by Jamni the wealthy merchant...when taken as being representative of the attitudes of rich to poor accross the whole city...would be REALLY powerful and really unique gaming.

As another example, the struggle of Gomo the farmer to finish his irrigation ditch in time for the planting while dealing with a squabbling family situation and persistant tax collectors would have a wealth of application. He manages to complete the ditch (interpreted as farmers across the city improving their farms during this period and raising the city's agriculture rating), but his family situation goes down the tubes (interpreted as a social rebellion by the youth against the authority of family patriarchs and adjusting city stats accordingly, and he manages to bribe the tax collector to not throw him in prison (interpreted as an increase in corruption in the government bureaucracy).


In this way, spending a couple of sessions bouncing from one character to another would highlight the prevailing attitudes, beliefs, and events of a generation. Then when some threshold has been crossed, flash forward to a new generation where the stats that have been changed by the previous generation now give the city a whole new flavor and set of problems to deal with.

In the process the entire history of a city (and by extension a region) is told through the anecdotal stories of "the real people who lived there".

Just like Michener's characters in The Source.


Now as for the Sim / Narrative stuff. For me the story would be alot more compelling if it were loaded with "real" history and mythology and lots of effective "sim" elements of the city and time being portrayed. But the gameplay itself really can't be sim...because in a sim there is no way that Lodi the beggar is going to have a major impact on the entire city (unless he accidentally pushed a flower pot on the head of the emperor or something). So the game really needs to be a very setting intensive narrative game, where the players are cooperating at "revealing" a great epic about the city, and where "great" is defined as including staying within the boundaries of historic authenticity.

Thats my 50 cents anyway.

Valamir wrote:
I'm not really sure I'm following where this thread is going. There seems to be a lot of discussion about Narrative components vs Simulation components that I don't see as adding a whole lot to the idea of what this game is. In fact, from where I'm sitting it seems to be muddying things up.

A game session will revolve around a particular group of citizens/visitors/interested parties engaged in some key moment of their lives, that key moment being defined as some moment that is of importance to both the character and the city.

The characters may be princes and persons of power, but I don't see this as necessarily so. ...this modification could have interesting impact on city politics for the next session.

In fact, playing persons of no great importance would be ideal for the game. Using their stories as an anecdote

In the process the entire history of a city (and by extension a region) is told through the anecdotal stories of "the real people who lived there".

Now as for the Sim / Narrative stuff. ...the gameplay itself really can't be sim...because in a sim there is no way that Lodi the beggar is going to have a major impact on the entire city (unless he accidentally pushed a flower pot on the head of the emperor or something).

I don't think I'd do a "individual phase" / "city phase" thing at all.
Course this is just an outside opinion I'm just throwing out there.

What I'd enjoy playing most would go something like this

1) wildly fast but setting colorful character creation (Donjon complexity or less).

2) the GM sets a series of plot hooks for the night's session. Not even full scenarios just little "day in the life" kind of vignettes. These don't even have to be related to each other. They could all have different characters, different locations in the city, and different aspects of city life they focus on. They may switch back and forth in a "meanwhile back at the ranch fashion"

3) the plot hook (which may range from a single brief scene to an extended mini scenario) would be played, with emphasis on focusing on conflicts, particularly ones that pit aspects of the city against each other. The GM should do absolutely no railroading or prejudgement of any kind. Given the "disposable" nature of characters there is no need to preserve character life or any of that. Allow the players to resolve the situation however they desire, and if that means the guard comes and summarily clubs them to death so be it. You're probably right, this could be done either narratively or sim-ly.

4) Then evaluate the scene paying attention to a) what issues the GM planted in the hook, b) how the players chose to resolve them, c) any other issues that may have come up that weren't planted. The emotional choices the players made should be interpreted as being representative of prevailing attitudes (among that class of people) in the city. Each character basically being the representative archetype of a merchant, or a farmer, or a soldier, or a visitor from Palmyra or whatever. The GM (either with or without input from the players) then interprets the scenario in terms of its impact on the City's stats. These stats should include Resource type stats like wealth, and defenses and such, but also Pendragon type trade-off stats representing the prevailing value system of the "majority" which may be reinforced or challenged by player actions.

5) start over at 1 until a sufficient "critical mass" of representative scenarios have been run for that decade or generation of time. Then apply all of the accumulated modifiers to the city stats and describe how the city has changed...become wealthier, become more involved in world politics, become more anarchal as the central priests lose power, etc.

6) then skip ahead to the next decade / generation wash and repeat.


Thats the sort of game I'd be most interested in.

Hiya,

I think we need to go ahead and start prototyping, more or less: I favour the "uruk phenomenon" as a starting point, anyone have any preferences? I like this 'cos its early and there will still be a lot of chalcolithic settlements about for contrast and context. We should probably select at least one other period to realise so that we can look at how to do periodic transitions.

I think we are all roughly converging on a model, although I should mention that if tyhe situation were rival kings, there might be a very gamist style employed... but I think we can reexamine the idea after we've dones some preliminary sim-based setting design. Lets pick a period, assemble some data, start thinking about ways to order it. We have an interesting story about the "me" to exploit; one of the Uruk tales is of how Innana brings the "me" - which are kinda the instruments of civilisation, like clothes and pottery and seals and dances - from Enkil, who has hidden them, to Uruk.
The "me" themselves can be used as the conceptual hook for mechanics at the city level; they can have properties and numbers. I'll see if I can find the list mentioned. Also specific trade goods and cultural artifacts should be presented explicitly.

Thinking of being summarily clubbed - I'd be inclined to favour a combat mechanic in which any level of success resulted in death - wounds result from combat failures. It's quite true to say that these are "disposable" characters and that protecting them from death is not a priority - I guess it would not protagonise them? Anyway, fair Sim because after all you can kill a person with any weapon, and many things that are not weapons. IIRC the dominant weapon is the mace and we should play up the precise cultural forms of violence.

We should probably employ some sort of character class framework - quite a lot of societies establish caste rankings through defined archetypes, and mesopotamia appears to have six, although I have not got that list either. Or perhaps based on cities or the like, or a synthesis of the two. Then there is of course the code of Hammurabi - quite interesting. Its a late document, but the invention of law is one of mesopotamias claims to fame and we probably want to give it some prominence. Maybe directly referenced in the mechanic? The code has a fair amount to say about the assembly of evidence for trials, all based on personal testimony and lex talionas.
Seeing as we are looking at life time periods, we might also want to look at aging and the calendrical system mechanically.

In terms of sim premise of the game I would say that after some time percolating, my premise would be "how does society work"; or, lets say if I were running it, I think I would functionally be proposing a vision of how society worked and the players would be judging its plausibility, more or less.

Magic. One of the things that caught my eye was the story of gilgamesh - it ends with a surprisingly existentialist crisis. They don't seem to have much of a sense of an afterlife either, although I need to do more reading, but instead of sort of existance as a whisp of dust in an empty room. Gilgamesh's tale declares quite brazenly that immortality, for humans, lies only in human memory. It's an interesting perspective and one I found contrasted in papers with the Egyptian system, first of the king only achieving an afterlife and then of this being achievable by cunning and artifice, more or less. It made me think there might be more to be had from presenting neighbouring cultures than I had previously thought. It might enhance the sense of distinct self for the mesopotamians, the nation of the "black heads" as they refer to themselves. There is also quite a conscious relationship with the neighbouring chalcolithic peoples, and myths surrounding the incorporation or assimilation of nomadic tribes into the urban society, usually by seduction. However, they are also looked down on as people who cannot talk properly, wash, or who will get a decent burial.

I think theres a lot to be had from the "critical mass" concept, especially in regards shifting scales as well as determining transitional moments. Possibly, building up to a breakpoint could be a mechanical method. Such climaxes should result in qualitative rather than quantitative changes in other mechanics - like being alive or dead, as it happens.

Well, I'm having fun:)

Hiya,

I think we need to go ahead and start prototyping, more or less: I favour the "uruk phenomenon" as a starting point, anyone have any preferences? I like this 'cos its early and there will still be a lot of chalcolithic settlements about for contrast and context. We should probably select at least one other period to realise so that we can look at how to do periodic transitions.

I think we are all roughly converging on a model, although I should mention that if tyhe situation were rival kings, there might be a very gamist style employed... but I think we can reexamine the idea after we've dones some preliminary sim-based setting design. Lets pick a period, assemble some data, start thinking about ways to order it. We have an interesting story about the "me" to exploit; one of the Uruk tales is of how Innana brings the "me" - which are kinda the instruments of civilisation, like clothes and pottery and seals and dances - from Enkil, who has hidden them, to Uruk.
The "me" themselves can be used as the conceptual hook for mechanics at the city level; they can have properties and numbers. I'll see if I can find the list mentioned. Also specific trade goods and cultural artifacts should be presented explicitly.

Thinking of being summarily clubbed - I'd be inclined to favour a combat mechanic in which any level of success resulted in death - wounds result from combat failures. It's quite true to say that these are "disposable" characters and that protecting them from death is not a priority - I guess it would not protagonise them? Anyway, fair Sim because after all you can kill a person with any weapon, and many things that are not weapons. IIRC the dominant weapon is the mace and we should play up the precise cultural forms of violence.

We should probably employ some sort of character class framework - quite a lot of societies establish caste rankings through defined archetypes, and mesopotamia appears to have six, although I have not got that list either. Or perhaps based on cities or the like, or a synthesis of the two. Then there is of course the code of Hammurabi - quite interesting. Its a late document, but the invention of law is one of mesopotamias claims to fame and we probably want to give it some prominence. Maybe directly referenced in the mechanic? The code has a fair amount to say about the assembly of evidence for trials, all based on personal testimony and lex talionas.
Seeing as we are looking at life time periods, we might also want to look at aging and the calendrical system mechanically.

In terms of sim premise of the game I would say that after some time percolating, my premise would be "how does society work"; or, lets say if I were running it, I think I would functionally be proposing a vision of how society worked and the players would be judging its plausibility, more or less.

Magic. One of the things that caught my eye was the story of gilgamesh - it ends with a surprisingly existentialist crisis. They don't seem to have much of a sense of an afterlife either, although I need to do more reading, but instead of sort of existance as a whisp of dust in an empty room. Gilgamesh's tale declares quite brazenly that immortality, for humans, lies only in human memory. It's an interesting perspective and one I found contrasted in papers with the Egyptian system, first of the king only achieving an afterlife and then of this being achievable by cunning and artifice, more or less. It made me think there might be more to be had from presenting neighbouring cultures than I had previously thought. It might enhance the sense of distinct self for the mesopotamians, the nation of the "black heads" as they refer to themselves. There is also quite a conscious relationship with the neighbouring chalcolithic peoples, and myths surrounding the incorporation or assimilation of nomadic tribes into the urban society, usually by seduction. However, they are also looked down on as people who cannot talk properly, wash, or who will get a decent burial.

I think theres a lot to be had from the "critical mass" concept, especially in regards shifting scales as well as determining transitional moments. Possibly, building up to a breakpoint could be a mechanical method. Such climaxes should result in qualitative rather than quantitative changes in other mechanics - like being alive or dead, as it happens.

Well, I'm having fun:) Although I've taken to poutting my text on the clipboard before I hit "submit".

I've not come across The Source, but one book which has made a great impact on me is Geoffrey Bibby's Four Thousand Years Ago. Almost written for the roleplayer, it subtitles as 'A Panorama of Life in the Second Millenium BC', essentially bronze age and a little later than the Uruk period. Each chapter looks at a place and a people and a critcal event (Kassite invasion of Egypt, building of Stonehenge, battle of Kadesh, rise of Assyria, the fall of Crete, etc) through the eyes of individuals present. Often they are ordinary people, though they are not named or described - its a documentary style for the most part. But I absolutely love it - one of my favourite books. This thread reminded me greatly of it. Of course , written in 1961 (Collins) lots of theories are a little squiffy now, but it doesn't dull the impact of his writing.

contracycle wrote:
I think we need to go ahead and start prototyping, more or less: I favour the "uruk phenomenon" as a starting point, anyone have any preferences? I like this 'cos its early and there will still be a lot of chalcolithic settlements about for contrast and context. We should probably select at least one other period to realise so that we can look at how to do periodic transitions.

I think we are all roughly converging on a model, although I should mention that if the situation were rival kings, there might be a very gamist style employed.

We have an interesting story about the "me" to exploit; one of the Uruk tales is of how Innana brings the "me" - which are kinda the instruments of civilisation, like clothes and pottery and seals and dances - from Enkil, who has hidden them, to Uruk.
The "me" themselves can be used as the conceptual hook for mechanics at the city level; they can have properties and numbers. I'll see if I can find the list mentioned. Also specific trade goods and cultural artifacts should be presented explicitly.

It's quite true to say that these are "disposable" characters and that protecting them from death is not a priority - I guess it would not protagonise them?

IIRC the dominant weapon is the mace and we should play up the precise cultural forms of violence.

We should probably employ some sort of character class framework - quite a lot of societies establish caste rankings through defined archetypes, and mesopotamia appears to have six, although I have not got that list either. Or perhaps based on cities or the like, or a synthesis of the two.

Then there is of course the code of Hammurabi - quite interesting. Its a late document, but the invention of law is one of mesopotamias claims to fame and we probably want to give it some prominence. Maybe directly referenced in the mechanic? The code has a fair amount to say about the assembly of evidence for trials, all based on personal testimony and lex talionas.
Seeing as we are looking at life time periods, we might also want to look at aging and the calendrical system mechanically.

In terms of sim premise of the game I would say that after some time percolating, my premise would be "how does society work"; or, lets say if I were running it, I think I would functionally be proposing a vision of how society worked and the players would be judging its plausibility, more or less.

Magic. One of the things that caught my eye was the story of gilgamesh

- it ends with a surprisingly existentialist crisis.

It made me think there might be more to be had from presenting neighbouring cultures than I had previously thought.

I think theres a lot to be had from the "critical mass" concept, especially in regards shifting scales as well as determining transitional moments. Possibly, building up to a breakpoint could be a mechanical method. Such climaxes should result in qualitative rather than quantitative changes in other mechanics - like being alive or dead, as it happens.

Well, I'm having fun.

Some details on the me:


In the Legend "Inanna and Enki: The Transfer of the Arts of Civilization from Eridu to Erech" Innana acquires the me of rulership from Enki by getting him drunk and leaving quickly. The me number over a hundred, but only sixty-eight have survived the test of time. Here is what we have of them:


en-ship, godship, the exalted and enduring crown, the throne of kingship, the exalted scepter, the royal insignia, the exalted shrine, shepherdship, kingship, lasting ladyship, (the priestly office) "divine lady," (the priestly office) ishib, (the priestly office) lumah, (the priestly office) guda, truth, descent into the nether world, ascent from the nether world, (the eunuch) kurgarra, (the eunuch) girbadara, (the eunuch) sagursag, the (battle) standard, the flood, weapons(?), sexual intercourse, prostitution, law(?), art, the cult chamber, "hierodule of heaven," (the musical instrument) gusilim, music, eldership, heroship, power, enmity, straight forwardness, the destruction of cities, lamentation, rejoicing of the heart, falsehood, art of metalworking, scribeship, craft of the smith, craft of the leatherworker, craft of the builder, craft of the basket weaver, wisdom, attention, holy purification, fear, terror, strife, peace, weariness, victory, counsel, the troubled heart, judgement, decision, (the musical instrument) lilis, (the musical instrument) ub, (the musical instrument) mesi, (the musical instrument) ala.

http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr563.htm

This is translation of a set of instructions to farmers; makes quite detailed reading.

This is part of a collection of sumerian literature which can be found here:
http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/catalogue.htm

Note you have to drill down about 4 levels to get the english translation from a tiny link at the bottom of each page of "composite text"

More random notes.

The time frame keeps shifting on me. For a focused game with lots of action centered on each character, I see a game that goes from, say, Ur to Babylon at most. A total of only a few centuries. For a much more epic game, it could go from Eridu or Uruk to Chaldean Babylonia. A total of almost three millenia. The problem with the first idea is that you never get to see the hanging gardens or other later greatness. The problem with the second is that you'd have to go through characters pretty quickly or have big gaps in time to cover thirty centuries of life, which leaves somthing to be desired continuity-wise.

This brings us back to the possibility of doing it as "Mythic Babylon". In that case we can allow for much greater civilizations to grow in a much shorter time, ignoring any sticky "impossibilities" due to actual history. In any case, the game will be ahistoric, so why not go for this sort of aglomeration?


As far as social positions, there seem to have been three distinct classes throughout Mesopotamian history. Noble, Common, and Slave. Other than that, I haven't been able to find notes on what positions were higher than others.


We have to incorporate the griffin and other composite creatures, somehow. They're just too cool to ignore.


Oh, and that site above, Gareth. Awesome. Tons of translations. That's great.


And is it just me (hah) or do the me seem like an attribute list?

Mike