Topic: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
Started by: Ron Edwards
Started on: 8/18/2010
Board: Playtesting
On 8/18/2010 at 3:14am, Ron Edwards wrote:
As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
I found myself musing again over fantasy games and fantasy settings. I wanted to make one, for no particular reason except for fun, and it struck me that the weird, not 1:1, but undeniable political correspondences in both Glorantha and the World of Near were strong anchoring points for me. I could get into the fantasy adventure and color without having the real-world symbolism shoved in my face, but the political underpinning gave the whole thing an edge that demanded play, producing a reflective, revealing, but non-self-conscious commentary.
I came up with some neat color and setting notions, but for one thing, I somehow lost the most crucial page of written notes, which almost axed the whole project because that's so frustrating, and for another, every time I started to work on it, the real-world stuff was too obvious. I had to set that aside. Instead, I focused on pure Color, especially violence and magic. What did I want this to look like? I came up with ...
1. Beauty, especially violence - as I wrote in my notes, "Everyone is drawn by Barry Windsor Smith." I wanted the same kind of ethereal yet muscular/bloody effect he got in all that sword-and-sorcery he did.
2. Weird metaphysics involving metal, blood, water, and stone, as well as a kind of SF/fantasy phosphorus-napalm-radon type energy. A kind of Barsoom effect seemed about right.
3. Monsters. The key image was from Conan #23, that full-page shot of the magical serpent or dragon or whatever it was, coiling above Conan and Red Sonja (dressed in real clothes back then) in a spray of gem-dust and eldritch energy. Smith drew gorgeous, lovely monsters - even that horrifying dog from #20 was impressive as an anatomy-text muscled killing machine. Images of metallic lamiae and bronze dragons spewing radioactive fire and weird, jelly-like mantas began to rear up in my imagination.
4. A sprawling city of stone, itself so vast that whole areas are wilderness but it's still "the city."
Some of this didn't fit the preconceived real-world at all, and that's good. I didn't let that distract me and kept going. I had a creative itch going and various moods and imagery were starting to gel, associated with different source material (strongest: the Book of the New Sun and Barry Windsor Smith's 1970s work on the Conan comics). Then the basic fantastical-setting notion, or conceit, occurred to me.
5. Reverse elegy - exactly the opposite of the classic motif (The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Last Unicorn, The Return of the King) in which myth and Faerie are fading away forever, leaving behind a mundane world which despite its virtues is rather drab. Instead, a thorough-going, complete fantasy-adventure, mythic land (sort of Ancient Greece in the sense of heroes and monsters), which happens to have spawned upon what was once a modern, technological landscape. No one knows this or remembers it, just as in classic elegy in which everyone thinks the magical days were always merely stories.
All this became a single new starting point and now I was cooking. Fantasy-first, Color-first, letting the politics provide the passion rather than the literal content. I recomposed the original setting notes, this time casting each thing into the fantasy as I now understood it, reducing or expanding or twisting each one as it seemed to fit best, often without much reflection or re-thinking. Now my people and populace and back-story started to be exciting.
I started looking over the Solar System, as it seemed reasonable to use a customizable package for the rules-set I was leaning towards anyway. In the middle of messing with that, not very seriously or with much intention to do anything with this stuff except play it one day, an artist named Bentti Bisson contacted me by email and made himself available for art services. This happens a lot, and I always look at the portfolio or whatever ... and damn, but he was perfect. His work was exactly what I was thinking of. We did business and you can see the three pieces at his DeviantArt gallery page: Ghost Army, Social Differences, and Stealing an Identity. Check out his black-and-white comics pages for the Terragoth Chronicles too, as that's the style we were angling for. He was really fun and professional to work with, even for this thing which I admitted up-front was way premature to think of as a publishing project.
(I'm not being too explicit about the setting in this post only to keep myself to the point about the process, but I'm happy to talk about it. The best way is probably to ask me about anything that intrigues you in the illustrations. Try to be specific, please; it'll make things easier and more fun.)
The finished art was understandably inspirational; it revved up my motor for looking and thinking about actual play, rules applications, and maybe even design. I sat down with the Solar System and found that it didn't quite click for me, for this purpose. That might be due simply to a difference of vision, in that making the rules-set generic seems ... well, generic in the sense of dilution or lack of distinction. Then I looked again and found stuff that made a lot of sense. I liked the Effect rules which formalized implications in the original, I liked 10 points rather than 11 for starting Pools, and I liked the sequence of conceptual steps that anchored character creation to character concept. However, in contrast tot the Solar System's World of Near, I found that Clinton's original choices about keeping the number of skills very short worked better for me, as well as his deeper emphasis on explicit emotional, drug, and sexual content. So my preliminary rules, mostly about character creation to start, ended up being mainly a Shadow of Yesterday hack pulling some notions from the Solar System.
To be clear, what I'm talking about is an entirely original setting, with its own exclusive set of character groups (social not ethnic or species), skills, Secrets, and Keys. It's not an add-on to the world of Near, nor are any of the lists in either source game (TSOY or SS) be available for characters.
My first try with the material was in Italy, at InterNosCon, with Moreno Roncucci and Alessandro Ricco' playing some really good, really well-made characters. That part seemed accessible and fun. I'd worked hard on some of the ideas I'd discussed with Per and Matt in [The Shadow of Yesterday] Drugs, hugs, knives, and Zu, and thought about why our long-ago Hero Wars game had worked so well. My current text reads:
The Shadow of Yesterday, as with one of the fantasy settings that influenced it, Glorantha, requires a specific kind of thinking about character creation. You cannot simply proceed through menu options to assemble a character and then look him over to “see what you got.” Instead, the character should be created from your own interest in specific problematic features of the setting. This game is the same way. To make a character, you begin by thinking about:
· whether they are designated in-setting as Returned or of the People, and whether their paternal family reflects that designation
· their gender and general age (young, mature adult, middle-aged)
· their legal status (Citizen, Bonded, Resgistered) and wealth
· what religion they were raised in, including whether they are a member of an extreme group or a Sect
(plural used above in order to save space)
You don’t need all the details or an elaborate back-story, or even a strong idea about personality or general type of protagonist. But you do need those listed things. When you enter the character creation instructions, some of the things you’ll write down will be confirming them, and some of the things you write down will be development reserved for that moment.
... based on what I told the players in this session.
However, in play, I ran into trouble! There existed a weird gap that I hadn't encountered much before, between back-story setup and the content of scene framing. It's not easy to describe, but effectively, my scenes were starting way too far into the crisis mode inherent in the setting, and "story" was shaping up to be over before it began. My first scene included the public execution of one of the character's love-interest, and then I felt sort of forced to introduce my monster, and I even made a bunch of arbitrary decisions about what the monster was in order shoehorn it into the situation at all. So there we were, finding the protagonist at the climax point of what was supposed to be Story Now, not Story About Over. I'd presented conflicts that were already so advanced they fractured the character right in half, and that meant resolving them with too much content regarding what had already happened.
At GenCon, Matt Wilson and John Harper were kind enough to sit down to take a look at the material. I was very focused on that difficult stage, which entailed going through character creation of course. As with the previous playtest, this went really well and prompted all sorts of enthusiastic reactions for each revealed feature of setting. Bentti's picture of the two guys dueling (one with ghosts, another in a kind of Zen prepared sword-stance) is an example of "Sect war" - the Sects in this setting are nascent wizard-schools, combining sword-training, mental practice, magical results, and militia-based turf wars. Matt and John liked the Sects and each made up a Sect character; John chose Sheelkah, the same one as the ghost-army guy in the picture, and Matt chose Rallak, whose members give over their souls (as they see it) to be held by others, thus becoming (i) hard to kill and (ii) morally unaccountable for what they do in that state.
One thing I'd already worked out was that the local demographics of a given game would be set by those of the player-characters, so the only two Sect player-characters meant the district was pretty lawless in terms of the overall culture, with two active Sects in an area, and that meant a couple of possible things, of which "competition over a resource" was attractive to the players. One or the other, I don't remember which, instantly said, "A master sword-smith!" In other words, Sect war a'brewin'. This is a pretty straightforward case of what I as GM might prep in Dust Devils if one character were a determined stagecoach-robbing outlaw and the other were an idealistic and ruthless sheriff. In the other playtests, the character compositions were socially more layered and led to more politically complex areas of the city.
Anyway, we were able to run two or three scenes, in which I took great care to start well back in the "normal" life situations of the characters, not jumping ahead into the crazy-ass conflicts implicit in their material. I had several tools, as every PC in this rules-thing I've made comes with two active NPCs, and in each game, there's supposed to be at least one Monster. (In this case, a bronzy-metallic lamia type monster, with the preparatory actions of consuming and absorbing metal, and the ultimate agenda of reprodution. This is Ed Heil's fault because he was sitting there at the table with us and drawing stuff like that.) So I was able to practice using such material "lightly," or rather, working with the idea that the various NPCs were not yet themselves in a state of crisis.
I consider this to be a seminal playtest because it arrived at a pretty concrete set of first-scene instructions for the GM and scenes, which of course I will put to their test in the next time around.
Stage 1, "Social portraits" - in which the GM runs at least one of the following options for each player-character, with a strong emphasis on expressing NPC viewpoints; the GM initiates no physical conflicts
i) player-character + one of *another* PC's NPCs who is linked to this player-character through religious group (note: one of the features of setup is that all such characters know one another)
ii) player-character + one of his or her own NPCs
iii) two player-characters who know one another through religious group
I did (i) for both Matt's and John's characters, quite successfully. It became grimly clear that Sect war was under way, as a Rallak leader was determined to exclude or control Sheelkah access to the sword-smith.
Stage 2, Monster fucks up social crisis - given Stage 1, there simply must be some kind of sociopolitical and emotional tensions arising among characters. Have at least one NPC take direct action, and if logical, in concert with some group he or she belongs to. Play this not by having the NPC rant and rave about what they're about to do, but by cutting to the effects of the action at some point. Also, now that various characters are in motion concerning what they want, disrupt what they want via a (or the) monster's action. Again, show this as an effect; keep the monster off-screen.
In our case, this meant that the Sheelkah posted guards around the swordsmith, and when Rallak guys came up to throw their weight around, everyone went inside ... to find the swordsmith missing and a big hole in the floor (if I remember correctly). I should also have said that the various metallic things in the workshop, swords included, were eroded and consumed-looking.
Throughout: for this to make sense, you should know that my monster creation rules identify a Key from each player-character as part of its obsessive nature, and whenever a Key is activated in any way, the monster takes direct action, probably making an appearance. However, they only offer harm toward a player-character who's given up the Key the monster was obsessed with. (To save myself from going insane, I'm also saying that the number of monsters can vary from one to [# PCs - 1]. That way, you can keep the obsessions coherent.) So through all of these stags and whatever it is you decided to do as GM, you can always find yourself bringing the monster in when a PC uses one of those Keys.
I can talk about why and how I'm using monsters in a game inspired by The Shadow of Yesterday, which very clearly articulates its "no gods, no monsters" concept. Later though.
I'm now definitely interested in seeing whether this prep is sufficient and reliable to get our story-in-progress under way, so that finally, I can see whether the reward mechanics help to produce cool Transcendence and larger-scale setting impact.
Anyone who was involved in these sessions, please post! Your thoughts after this passage of time will be very helpful to me.
The good news is that now that I'm back home, my friends Tod, Maura, and Julie have prepped some characters and we'll start playing a game in earnest soon. I've already developed some new concerns based on the characters they made up, especially one who seems to have found a way to straddle religious groups. I have to decide whether that's a good thing or not.
I have some questions to unravel in later play too. The Solar System removes the Shadow of Yesterday mechanic called Bring Down the Pain. Which way do I want it? I'm not sure. Also, in the original rules, NPCs were built like player-characters, only with smaller Pools, whereas in the Solar System, NPCs are handled in a more abstract way which strikes me as much easier and without a discernible downside. So which way do I want it, or do I need to concoct a third way? I'm not sure. Playtesting ahoy.
Best, Ron
Forge Reference Links:
Topic 21952
On 8/18/2010 at 8:07am, Eero Tuovinen wrote:
Re: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
Interesting. I'll be intrigued to see what you're doing monster-wise; the TSoY admonition against them is mostly about story structures not resting on violence as a non-controversial right solution, which is a stylistic issue, but then the rules-system is also structured such that it tends to be more interesting to play if the opposition in conflict is human. Bringing Down the Pain especially can get somewhat grinding if there's no pressure valve in the form of negotiable interests available.
As a clarification, the Solar System text doesn't get rid of Bringing Down the Pain - I just renamed the thing into "extended conflict" to make the name a bit more transparent and stylistically neutral.
On 8/18/2010 at 12:57pm, Paolo D. wrote:
RE: Re: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
Hi Ron! :-)
A question, maybe very naive, but I try:
as a Story Guide, have you tried to do the prep (after chargen) with the suggested procedure from the Solar System? I'm talking of the "Adventure Map" explained in Chapter Nine (from here if you need a quick reference).
I'm thinking of this because maybe your "monsters" can be used to fill the sheet while you "connect the dots" in the adventure map.
These days I'm playing the Solar System with the setting of "our old D&D campaign" (that, of course, was very far from D&D at all, even while we was playing with the d20 system - yes, we are doing this in a very sentimental way ;-) ) and, as a SG, I'm using monster in that way.
I can make some AP if you think it can help.
On 8/18/2010 at 2:34pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Re: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
Hi Paolo,
That's a good resource.
The techniques described in the Adventure Map are similar to what I habitually do for most role-playing games, and it's possible that my posting here at the Forge over the years, especially regarding Sorcerer preparation, may have contributed to the contents of this part of The Solar System. (Eero can tell us if he wants.) It works exceptionally well for most games.
The trouble with this particular design is different, however: the content is so frightfully charged with enticing tension. The setting is a social powder keg. The characters are fiery individuals on the threshold of being truly significant heroes, each with two highly-involved NPCs. The monsters are obsessed, personalized NPCs in their own right.
My problem is not "gee, there's all this stuff, what should I do," but rather the opposite - avoiding leaping into play with every character's "story gun" blazing, because all we'd play is a couple of climactic confrontations and be done. I'm coming up with ways to let the characters breathe and be a little bit normal for a while, and to keep the over-excited GM from framing into crazy actions and conflicts that originate only in his or her notebook.
I'm interested in your monsters and would definitely like to know more about how you utilized them in play.
Best, Ron
On 8/18/2010 at 5:42pm, Eero Tuovinen wrote:
RE: Re: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
Ron wrote:
The techniques described in the Adventure Map are similar to what I habitually do for most role-playing games, and it's possible that my posting here at the Forge over the years, especially regarding Sorcerer preparation, may have contributed to the contents of this part of The Solar System. (Eero can tell us if he wants.) It works exceptionally well for most games.
Yes, definitely this. I was thinking earlier today that I should say something about how I'm sure there's nothing new to Ron in that part of the booklet, but decided that it'd seem too cheeky. Regardless, the truth is that the SS GMing section is just a (hopefully) logical overview on the nature of the GM role and technical approach to narrativist play pioneered by Ron in Sorcerer and developed later on by many different people, among them Clinton, whose game I rewrote largely as a generic treatise on how a game of this sort works. That adventure map thing, for instance, is a largely arbitrary variation of no great concern on principles developed right here in 2002-2004 or so. This is pretty much what is said in the SS booklet afterword as I remember it.
Regarding moments of quiet and slowing down the unravelling of the plot, it occurs to me that one way to encourage those would be to cut the Pools by half, thus precipitating refresh scenes more often. You're supposed to do a refresh scene basically whenever a player wants one, and refresh scenes can't progress the story, so having those more often would help some in reducing the pressure to hurry forward; the most productive use for a refresh scene is often in introducing new elements that give rise to conflicts in later scenes, so having more refreshes would give the SG natural places to insert his own material and establish the gravity of forth-coming conflicts.
In fact, if the scenario-building procedure leaves you with an immediately volatile situation, you might even consider starting the characters with empty Pools as a matter of principle, implying that the first round of scenes should consist of refreshment and simple character development instead of immediate conflict. This could ostensibly be a stylistic quirk of the game, sort of like the way Dark Sun and Ravenloft are always presented as these hardcore grimdark places where normal D&D character come to die: "My setting is so bad-ass that when you begin the game, state why your character starts his first scene completely exhausted and fucked up beyond all recognition. Then ask the Story Guide for a refreshment scene."
Of course fiddling with the resource cycle is not a complete answer. In addition to social scenes that establish gravity I myself do information control and stuff related to conflict scope - have the other guy needed for the showdown be far away so you first need to travel to them, say. All sorts of Shakespearean shit, basically; once you have a firm conflict defined it's just a matter of delaying resolution with practicalities until the theme has been thoroughly established in all gravity. Of course, if this moment is already imminent when the game begins, perhaps there should be some explicit complication that comes in mid-way through? That is, if we already have a thoroughly established conflict at the start, it might be beneficial to inject some doubt into the proceedings at some point. Perhaps the monster does that here.
On 8/19/2010 at 3:29am, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Re: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
Hi everyone,
I think my current rules notions solve the problem without doing anything to numbers on the sheet. I'm looking forward to seeing it during our first session and will report how it goes.
Also, looking over the thread, I find that I'm turning this into an "original vs. new" debate between The Shadow of Yesterday and The Solar System, which isn't my intention although I'll admit I conducted a private debate about it. And as it turns out, as I progress through playtesting, I find myself doing more with the Solar System than I'd thought. I appreciate the reminder about Extended Conflicts which I'd unfairly forgotten. So what exact form the rules will take - application of the Solar System, or Solar System with strong structural modeling from The Shadow of Yesterday, or Shadow of Yesterday with a few pieces of Solar System - I'm not sure. So I should merely find out and not decide or force it at this point. Obviously I'll refer to both in the text.
Oh yes, and monsters. On reading the relevant text, I definitely agree that by monsters, Clinton was referring to the restricted meaning of designated and isolated foe, with the added implication of wandering monster which is, in his experience and mine too, especially isolated from anything else going on. Something which you're supposed to fight but there's no imaginable reason to fight. Perhaps, I suppose, in the context of the reward mechanics of the time, a way to have fights even though the player-characters are successfully avoiding them.
Whereas by monsters for this game, not only do I mean what I wrote about in Naked Went the Gamer, but also a dramatic accentuator to politics infused with emotion. I'm thinking of the mythical minotaur, the product of a queen's sexual intercourse with a bull provided for divine sacrifice, and thus blasphemous as well as perverted - and yet the king then is able to use the offspring as a way to humiliate his political rivals in a particularly horrible fashion. So confronting the minotaur is by no means a monster-fight in the sense that Clinton criticized, it is instead setting-specific, passionately-charged drama. That's what I'm after here.
Best, Ron
On 8/19/2010 at 4:20am, Simon C wrote:
RE: Re: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
My read of Clinton's "No monsters" stipulation was that it tied pretty closely to the "only people" part of the phrase. In other words, the problem was with foes that existed qua foes, creatures that were beyond human compassion.
No gods, as in, no beings that are above conventional human concerns. No monsters, as in, no intelligent beings that exist outside of our moral framework. Only people, as in, every intelligent being you meet is motivated by desires that are comprehensible on a human level.
So by that reading, I think the monsters you're suggesting are a little outside what Clinton dictates. You seem to be talking about monsters more as a manifestation of perfidous human will - the queen's debauchery and the king's pride made flesh. Monsters are not themselves people, but they represent the will of one or more people.
More broadly, there's something about fantasy gaming that keeps dragging me back. Part of it is purely the colour, I think; swords drawn from scabbards, white knuckles grasping a spear-hilt, grim figures clad in wool and steel. Something about that has always drawn me. But I think also there's something about what you describe as those not quite 1:1 political correspondences that makes for rich fodder. I think freeing political situations from their real-world locations, shaving off the endless weight of history and fractal complexity, and writing the issues large enough that there's room to write your own story in the margins lets you really explore and reinterpret those issues. I'm reminded of Mars Colony, which lets you play around with real-life politics in a nicely history-less setting.
On 8/19/2010 at 8:16am, Eero Tuovinen wrote:
RE: Re: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
Ron wrote:
Also, looking over the thread, I find that I'm turning this into an "original vs. new" debate between The Shadow of Yesterday and The Solar System, which isn't my intention although I'll admit I conducted a private debate about it. And as it turns out, as I progress through playtesting, I find myself doing more with the Solar System than I'd thought. I appreciate the reminder about Extended Conflicts which I'd unfairly forgotten. So what exact form the rules will take - application of the Solar System, or Solar System with strong structural modeling from The Shadow of Yesterday, or Shadow of Yesterday with a few pieces of Solar System - I'm not sure. So I should merely find out and not decide or force it at this point. Obviously I'll refer to both in the text.
For what it's worth, I find the differences between the TSoY 2nd edition text and Solar System pretty minor in technical terms. Mostly it's just written a bit differently, perhaps emphasizing some things over others. As you mentioned above, some people have said that SS feels too dry for them in comparison to Clinton's personalized text, while others have said that SS is more clear; those are just textual differences, ultimately. If you have some sense of substantial differences, do write about those; I'd find it interesting. The only part that I notice as substantially different in my own play is that SS with Effects resembles Sorcerer with its roll-over mechanics; many situations are tied together by developing Effects, which provides a mechanical "bridge" between development scenes and climax scenes.
Whereas by monsters for this game, not only do I mean what I wrote about in Naked Went the Gamer, but also a dramatic accentuator to politics infused with emotion. I'm thinking of the mythical minotaur, the product of a queen's sexual intercourse with a bull provided for divine sacrifice, and thus blasphemous as well as perverted - and yet the king then is able to use the offspring as a way to humiliate his political rivals in a particularly horrible fashion. So confronting the minotaur is by no means a monster-fight in the sense that Clinton criticized, it is instead setting-specific, passionately-charged drama. That's what I'm after here.
Yes, this is quite viable. As I discuss in WoN in some place, the Qek necromancy in TSoY creates this sort of monsters. Also, the giant chapter in WoN discourses upon monsters in a similar sense, and how the monster can be a setting factor instead of a dramatic antagonist.
On 8/19/2010 at 1:14pm, Paolo D. wrote:
RE: Re: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
Ron wrote:
I'm interested in your monsters and would definitely like to know more about how you utilized them in play.
Ok, I'll try :-)
Our game is, first of all, a matter of color. We want to play the "feeling" of our old D&D campaign (very personalized, with all the geography, hystory, society, and often npcs we was used to) but with the system (I can't find a better term right now, sorry) of the Solar System: Keys, Pools, the cycle of action-consequences-ect., is the sort of thing we REALLY wanted to play since 2001, but we couldn't, because... Well, we had only the d20 system (and some CA clash problems in the group, I admit - now we are only 4 instead of 6 and we are more on the same frequence).
This setting is very TSoY-like: the fiends swarmed all over the world, they were banished (at most) and now, 150 years after, the world tries to rebuilt itself.
Now, the prep:
in the party, there is a cleric of Obad-hai and a paladin "Grey guard" (an old D&D 3.5 prestige class: the paladin allowed to "break rules" and do bad things for a final good, at his own discretion) and a third character that is not important for the purpose of this AP.
The paladin has the Key of Compassion, and the cleric a Key of Vow about protecting innocente creatures - so almost the same thing.
The main situation of that adventure is that, to be quick, the characters are leading a group of survivor in the wild (an ancient battlefield), trying to reach a safe community.
Part of the color of "our old D&D" was about devils and demons - so let's put some fiends!
I take the "compassion flag", the "survivors situations" (and the implicit "fiends color") and I create an npc with strong motivations:
there is another group of "survivors": they are devils, lead by an half-fiend half-human. They are lost since the war, and now they have nothing to eat. So they reach the human survivors and say:
"We are far away from our home (the Nine Hells of Baator) and starving to death, just like you. We are in the same boat. Just give us three of four of you to feed us, then we'll be allies and we'll help you to get back to your community. If you don't, we'll hunt you down".
And they were... Fiends. We played seven years almost just rolling d20 and killing them, but now they are "people". Maybe "evil" people, but with needs and rights just like any other sentient being.
The compassion? Yes, obviously you have to take care of the survivors, but these devils are survivor too!
What about "compassion" now? ;-)
These devils was build to "hit" the "compassion flag" - a point of contact between the main color of the setting and some Keys. This was a very strong bang: we played an entire session on this. The paladin wanted to seek out volounteers for the sacrifice, and the cleric wanted to save all the humans. They went in conflict against each other very quickly.
And the players are enjoying that very much.
That was the AP, but after your (Ron) post I realize that the problem in your playtest is about having "too much" conflict potential, and not the opposite. Soo.. I'll wait for more playtest, I think.
(And I'm very interested in your game - since you told me about it at breakfast during InterNosCon ;-)
On 9/3/2010 at 2:29pm, contracycle wrote:
RE: Re: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
Ron wrote:
Oh yes, and monsters. On reading the relevant text, I definitely agree that by monsters, Clinton was referring to the restricted meaning of designated and isolated foe, with the added implication of wandering monster which is, in his experience and mine too, especially isolated from anything else going on. Something which you're supposed to fight but there's no imaginable reason to fight. Perhaps, I suppose, in the context of the reward mechanics of the time, a way to have fights even though the player-characters are successfully avoiding them.
Dunno how much emphasis on the monster thing you want but thought I'd chime in here. I never saw wandering monsters that way; I think the filled several functions.
- to give a dungeon or whatever a sense of dynamism, making it more than just fixed encounters (monsters in boxes). This also meant the GM had some scope to imagine for themselves, "so, what are these goblins doing here anyway?"
- to represent the demographics of the dungeon or region. Your fixed encounters might go through a whole bunch of wildly different opponents, but if the wandering monster tables are full of goblins, you know this is a goblin area.
- similarly, they can be pure setting exposition. A random encounter with a group of goblins doesn't mean those goblins aren't all already dead, as foreshadowing of something else, say. They do not need to be combat encounters at all
- to deter the "camp and restock" behaviour prompted by the Vancian magic system, and keep up forward movement through the dungeon; rear areas are not safe areas
- later, to concoct some mode of play pertinent to overland travel beyond saying "we go there".
Anyway, maybe this is stuff for another thread if it warrants more discussion. But I don't think wandering monsters were "just fights"; all the above functions could be aplicable to an "only people" setting.
On 9/14/2010 at 12:03am, Chris_Chinn wrote:
RE: Re: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
Hi Ron,
The pacing of the monster to keys seems like a really neat idea. Have you put any thought as to what might be triggered (if anything) when players take a new Key or abandon a Key? It seems like there might be something fun to mine out from that.
Chris
On 9/14/2010 at 1:28am, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Re: As yet unnamed Shadow of Yesterday hack
Hey Chris,
My thinking was that if a player-character finishes a full Key makeover, basically the monster sees him or her as a straightforward target. Until then it's more interactive, more entwined with the character's behavior than out to kill him or her.
But all this is seriously speculative, pending play to that point. Haven't made it that far yet.
Gareth, my apologies, I missed your post - those are all good points about the technique of wandering monsters. I don't want to speak for Clinton, but at least my interpretation of "no gods, no monsters" in The Shadow of Yesterday is from my experiences when those points didn't apply, or weren't applied, and the presence of such things detracted from the game in a specific way.
Best, Ron