Last week Kat and I went to Brennan Taylor’s place. We kicked around some ideas, Kat suggested Universalis, Brennan said “I’ll play, but I haven’t had the best experiences with it. I like a character that is mine.”

To which, I replied: “We’ll just add a tenet that allows each player to keep one character.” And that’s what I did on my first turn in the Tenet phase. Kat added “Magic is real.” Brennan added “This is like a Grimms fairy tale.” BAM! We all passed so we could get right into play. Just that one tenet told us everything we needed to know.

I’m not going to go into a coin-by-coin breakdown of the game (partially because my notes are a mess). High-level summary: The are the three sons of a woodcutter. Dieter, the eldest (my character) goes out into the world to seek his fortune. He’s given an amulet of luck by his sister (Kat’s character). He gets corrupted by gamblers in the city, loses the amulet, and doesn’t return home for a year.

Gregor, the second son, goes into the city to find him. He’s given an amulet of protection by his sister. He’s captured by bandits on his way into town, barely getting away with his skin. He takes his brother away from the city, but cannot regain his amulet. On the way home, they overhear talk of a princess trapped in an invisible castle, that can only be seen by moonlight. The greedy eldest brother insists that they rescue her for the reward. They are followed by a mysterious stranger.

Since they don’t return home, Oskar, the youngest son (Brennan’s character) goes after them. He’s given an amulet by his sister. On the road, he shares his food with a little old man that tells him of a magical cherry grove. He goes to town, gets his brother’s amulet back.

Meanwhile, Dieter & Gregor go to the darkest part of the forest, where the castle is supposed to be. They are confronted by the little old man, who guards the castle. The mysterious stranger is revealed as his daughter. The little old man will let them in if they bring him three cherries from the witch’s cherry grove.

Oskar befriends the witch, and she charges him to guard her cherry grove (although it’s already guarded by a fence of bone and several wyverns). Dieter, Gregor, and the wizard’s daughter (Amara) show up. Oskar returns Dieter’s amulet, but cannot let them pick the cherries—he’s promised the witch to guard the grove. They steal a caged nightingale from the witch’s cottage and use it to put the wyverns to sleep. Then, Oskar picks the cherries himself.

They all return to the invisible castle. The wizard uses the cherries to replant the three rotten trees around the castle, making it visible. One of the rapidly-growing trees snags Oskar and carries him up to the balcony of the princess. The witch shows up for revenge. A spell goes astray, and the magic nightingale is turned into a beautiful woman.

Oskar & the princess fall in love. Dieter & the wizard’s daughter fall in love. Gregor and the nightingale-woman fall in love. They all return home before the woodcutter disowns them in a rage. And they all lived happily ever after.

A few observations…

With Brennan’s reluctance to play Uni because of character-ownership issues, and conversations with Kat about what she likes in role-play, I didn’t think either of them would be happy with the sort of high-level plot summarizing that Uni play can sometimes become. With this in mind, I made sure to do lots of dialogue and more traditional “role-play” stuff. We’d play things out, and pay for them afterward. It worked really, really well, with everyone very involved in the story.

I had a heck of a lot of fun changing my own traits. I probably picked this up from reading about tSoY play, but taking a moment to change something on your character sheet is a thrill. So, in his first scene I’d given him Forceful and Greedy, and Kat suggested Addicted to Gambling. Once his brother Gregor convinced him that he’s ruined his life with gambling, Brennan won the conflict and paid to cross off Addicted to Gambling, but then I paid to cross off Forceful because he had been humbled by his younger brother. Later, when Oskar gave him his amulet back, I paid to remove Greedy—the amulet had healed his character flaw. I felt like I was really making a statement by changing these things.

By the end, we weren’t rolling conflicts. It was pure Interruption and/or Negotiation. With the Grimms tenet on the table, and all the characters in play, we each had a strong sense that the story was going where it was supposed to.When someone had a good idea, they Interrupted and ran with it, with the other two making a suggestion here or there. With Grimms providing such strong genre expections, we all came to the same page on several issues without even mentioning them—like needing to add more women to the end of the story, so that the three brothers could find three brides. It also helped that the Grimms format lent itself to numerous, small scenes (we had 11 in about 3 hours). This gave us lots of coins, so we didn’t need conflicts. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad for Uni play, but I do know that it sure was fun.

That's interesting, Mike. I have a few friends who were turned off by the lack of player ownership in Uni. I just might point them to this thread to convince them to give it a shot.

Having played Universalis before there was a strange but good vibe about this game.  I don't know if it was just the spoken tenet of character ownership, or the unspoken, un paid for tenet of "back it up with dialoge"  It wasn't enough to describe the scenes with he said "quote" and then did this.  We'd set the scene, decribe what we wanted out of it and then play it out in character, which made for a very satifying game for me.

Elsa the daughter didn't have an amulet for the youngest brother and so gave him her own.  After loosing two son's to the wide world the woodcutter was not about to let the third son go so Elsa kept telling him that Oskar had gone out collecting honey for his breakfast, or was collecting feathers for his bed, it was a brief scene but I enjoyed it.

I'd played Uni twice before, and both times it was mildly interesting to me but not engaging in the way I expect from role-playing. Michael's suggestions were extremely helpful, and a lot of the roleplayed dialogue made it much more engrossing for me, even though the secondary characters travelled around between all three of us from scene to scene. I definitely think the Grimm's fairy tales genre helped us out as well, since the various traditional story elements were well understood by each of us, and all three of us were guiding the story toward the kind of ending we would expect in a Grimm's tale. We all knew that the brothers would be successful in the end, it was just a question of how they would accomplish it.

It's made me much more inclined to give Universalis a try again, but I will probably introduce tenets that back up this type of play again. I wonder if the strong genre requirements didn't help a lot, too. I was never lacking for coins, either. I actually had trouble spending them all, and in at least one scene I didn't even add enough details to spend all of my bid and I threw three coins back in the pot.