Last weekend Josh, Judson and I playtested Subversive Words.

Pasting from the summary paragraph of my draft: “Subversive words is two games in one, linking a dissident writer and the Tyrant that haunts his imagination. Players take the role of a writer struggling against censorship and other challenges of life in a dictatorship – and characters in a book the author is writing about the Tyrant. The two sides of the game have different rules. While in the “world of the book,” players describe events tied to words starting with random letters of the alphabet. In the “writer’s world,” narrated actions must fit with locations on an emotional wheel. Though the two worlds – and rules – are distinct, they also influence each other. Success or failure in one realm spills over into the other side of the game.”

This is the third game from Heads of State: nine short games about tyrants that our group has tried out. Before the playtest I worried that the rules were too skeletal to support the concept. After playing, my impression was that the concept worked. But we abandoned a bunch of rules during play and decided that some other subsystems, especially the rules linking the two sides of the game, were counterproductive and needed to be redone. I'm discovering that my strength is in the big picture and my weakness is in rule execution so this was a useful outcome.

Set up

We decided to play “the Duke”, a paternalistic Carpathian monarch that Judson had created during our earlier playtest of Rest & Relaxation. Our subversive words game was set in his kingdom sometime in the 1960s. We decided that the Duke’s secret service was ‘The Purple Hand.’ We collectively created our dissident writer: Dieter Glotz, a 60 year old divorcee with four grown daughters who are all loyal to the Duke’s regime. Dieter lectures on drama at the national university; he used to be a full professor but was forced out due to political views. His work Charms Overthrown: a critique of the Shakespearean Canon is well known in international literary circles.

We decided that the creative work that Dieter has been secretly writing was a play. We set the chapter length at 5 acts, which meant the game would consist of 5 scenes in the world of the play and 5 scenes in Dieter’s life. We agreed that the play would be about an overbearing father and his family and would be set in an idealized version of rural Carpathia at the beginning of the 20th century. Each of us suggested a working title for the play (A Carpathian Family, Papa Spider, King Leer). Our last preparation was to pick the main characters in the play: Papa, Mama, Uva (the oldest daughter), Hans (middle son), Ingrid (spoiled youngest daughter), and Yuri (Papa’s business partner, engaged to Uva).

Summary of the scenes.

Play act 1: Family eating dinner at their vineyard farmhouse. Gluttonous Yuri joins the meal and invites himself to stay the night; Papa says yes.
Dieter scene 1: Department head catches Dieter typing his play on university property, tells on Dieter to Purple Hand, Dieter is followed home by secret police.
Play act 2: Yuri forces himself on Uva, siblings and mama find out; Mama confronts papa, who slaps her into submission and insists he knows what is best for family.
Dieter scene 2: One of his daughters visits Dieter at his apartment; she is disillusioned that her husband, a royal bureaucrat, is exploiting peasants; they try to sneak out of building; limos pull up and Dieter is hustled into one and is awed to see Count Razinov, head of the Purple hand; Dieter is even more shocked when Razinov informs him that his help is needed to overthrow the Duke.
Play Act 3: at breakfast the next morning Yuri helps himself to food from everyone’s plate; Uva at first washes dishes submissively then she strikes Yuri in face with a greasy serving plate; Yuri, with blood streaming from his nose, strangles Uva.
Dieter scene 3: Count Razinov explains to Dieter that they will produce his play as a supposed tribute to Carpathian values, then arrest the Duke during the premier performance.
Play act 4: Papa delivers a touching funeral narration on his daughter’s life and her murder by ‘a wandering beggar’; after the service Papa promises that Yuri can marry his remaining daughter when Ingrid comes of age. Hans overhears and runs up to the house and opens the rifle cabinet.
Dieter scene 4: Dieter completes the play under purple hand supervision; they modify some minor scenes to reflect the communist ideology that Razinov intends to embrace when the Duke is deposed; Dieter manages to insert some acrostics in the text warning of the dangers of proletariat dictatorship.
Play act 5: Hans ambushes Papa and Yuri; he aims at Yuri but misfires and slays Papa. There is an epilogue showing the family property converted to a happy communal farm; and a secret alternative ending showing Yuri marrying mama and running the family much as before.
Dieter scene 5: Dieter attends the play premier; major chunks of the play have been changed but one actor sticks to the original lines including those with warning acrostics; that actor shoots at the Duke but misses, and security forces arrest Count Razinov. Dieter is taken to yet another limo, where the Duke greets him and suggests a few changes to the upcoming revised version of Dieter’s scholarly Shakespeare book.

Lessons:

Switching back and forth between the book and the writer was fun.

A play with its formal structure worked really well as the fictional world.

Judson and Josh took advantage of the play setting to visually frame scenes as if they were designing the staging.

We played 10 scenes in less than 2 ½ hours.

No one ever objected to requests that we switch from one side to the other.

We spent more time on the writer’s scenes than the play scenes.

We tended to make major plot twists or pose major mysteries then hand off narration to the next player.

The two scene-narrating mechanisms (alphabet based in the book; emotion based in the writer’s scenes) worked with these provisos: having a small pool of letters to choose from was better than picking one letter at a time; most of the game’s limits for alphabet-based narration were irrelevant; we spent more time on some emotions (surprise, fear) than others (awe, love); the currency for moving around the emotional wheel tended to slow down the story (rules to lock on one of the emotions and paying players to stay on the same emotion as the prior player should be eliminated).

The rules connecting the two sides of the game sucked.

Josh had a good idea to use letters, turn them over and use the blank reverse as currency for moving on emotion wheel, which connects the two sides of the game in one simple mechanic.

We forgot to return to the working titles to see if one of them should be the final title.

Can you expand on your use of the play?  I'm interested to know how this was handled, we only really have a description of the action in the IS above.  Was the play 'live' in the same way the rest was?  If so perhaps it would be appropriate to actually decidee the title after you are done. 

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear more about what was acxtually bgoing on among thre players; I see characters doing things but I don't know who is handling them.

We played the "real-world" of the author and then we played the world of the play, back and forth.  Narration was passed between players wholesale, so if you were narrating you were narrating for everybody.

yeah we didn't assign characters like were casting a play.

We 3 players each had a few letters of the alphabet in front of us. We took turns choosing a letter, announcing a word that started with the letter, then narrating the action of the play (controlling all characters, as Joshua mentioned) using our word as a main concept in the narration. Narration would pass around the table a couple of times until we were satisfied that enough had happened during that act of the play, and someone suggested we switch back to the writer.