So I’ve got this setting and campaign concept, and I wonder if anyone can think of a system that would admirably suit my goals. I’d rather not redesign from scratch; if some tinkering is required, that’s dandy, but I don’t see the point in reinventing the wheel.

This is a fantasy game, but with few non-humans; certainly no PC’s, at the start anyway, will be non-humans. There are four major continents, each with several quite different cultures. I have huge background notes on all sorts of stuff, but I’ll keep this to a minimum. Let me know if you need more.

Players will have initially one, and then later maybe two PC’s. At the start, there is a single GM (me), but I don’t mind sharing once things get rolling later on. I figure three players plus me, give or take.

Stage One
Background
Millennia ago, there was a wandering tinker who had a vision. This vision was apparently very elaborate, and he spent the rest of his life going around spreading the word. The Prophecy is essentially a short book (about the length of the Tao Te Ching, if you know it), in a rather elliptical verse style. Not a lot is entirely clear in it, but a few things are certain.

First of all, there is this Demon King who lives at the South Pole. Numerous wars and so forth will be fought over the next thousand-odd years, significantly instigated by the Demon King. Eventually, there will be three (or four, or whatever – insert number of players here) really important nations that will arise. These are described in somewhat complex terms. Each nation will then produce, by some means, a Champion.

Exactly 1500 years after the Great Eclipse (an absolutely known date not long after the Prophet’s mission), the Champions will assemble on the south continent’s tip (we’re in the southern hemisphere, which is more habitable than the northern), and then head off to fight the Demon King. They will fight, the Demon King’s Palace of Ice will be destroyed, and the Demon King himself will die. The Champions’ glorious self-sacrifice will usher in the perpetual Reign of the Sun.

Actual Play
Now everything in the Prophecy has been validated, and over time people have gotten pretty good at interpreting the way the Prophet talks. In the process, five major Commentaries have been produced, all somewhat longer than the original, and in one case much longer—as in, about the length of the whole Bible. Each of these Commentaries essentially stands as a kind of founding cultural document for one culture. One of those cultures is now essentially dead, as was in fact predicted within the prophecy and the culture’s Commentary itself, but the other four are going strong.

So as we approach the 1500 year mark, the three nations (everybody’s clear on which these are by now) have tournaments and whatnot to find their Champions. These Champions are the PC’s. They are exceedingly tough, dangerous, mighty warriors in their respective spheres. This is classic High Fantasy stuff: one nation likes Arthurian-style knights in armor on horseback, and their Champion is going to be a Launcelot type, more or less. Another nation likes samurai-style swordmasters, so their Champion is going to be a Musashi type. The details are up to the players, who can make of it what they like and I fill in the Commentaries and whatnot to produce the desired effect. You basically pick your favorite type of seriously dangerous warrior, with no direct overlaps (only one Launcelot, for example), and build an asskicker. In AD&D terms, these guys are something like twentieth level. You know, the best of the best, produced by a millennium and more of expertise and training to produce this one person.

Okay, so the first part of the campaign, just a few sessions, gets everyone to the south continent (they all speak Common or whatever, so no problem there), where they meet, become A Party (this is predetermined — they have to get along to some degree, and should ideally be chattering and bantering and generally having a good time), and head off to the Palace of Ice. Good dungeon-crawling happens, much wild sword-slinging, beer and pretzels for everyone, and in the end they beat the snot out of the Demon King. The ground begins to rumble, the ice collapses, and they fall, successful, under the ice to a cold but glorious death.

End part one.

Part Two
This is the interesting part, really, although I happen to like butt-kicking beer-and-pretzels fun.

Basically they see a bright light and a haze, and then slowly wake up. The Champions are lying on slabs in a big stone hall. There are people they don’t recognize around them. They have a little trouble communicating at first, because these people talk funny. Pretty soon, to their horror, they discover something unexpected.

The world continued after the Demon King fell, pretty much as usual in lots of ways. It’s been another thousand years. Nations have risen and fallen, cultures have split and coalesced, and in general the world has changed in lots and lots of ways. The thing is, this is a totally different kind of world, because the Prophecy is over. Nothing has absolute guidance any more.

So where’s the Reign of the Sun? What the hell happened? Well, this depends on the culture.

• One culture thinks the Sun is here, now, and that everyone who doesn’t see this is simply wrong.
• One culture thinks the whole thing was a monstrous mistake, and they worship the Demon King, who they claim never died anyway. The names of the Champions are now used as swear-words.
• One culture thinks the whole Reign of the Sun thing is actually a linguistic error – it just mean eternal lack of the Demon King, and nothing more.
• One culture thinks that the Demon King was only the physical manifestation of a larger force of evil, that the business about 1500 years was referring only to the first part of the whole thing, and that history itself will re-cycle on a grander scale, where the Champions are no longer necessary, and therefore this culture should go out and stomp anyone who might be on the wrong side, as indicated by their unwillingness to recognize the obvious truth.

And so on. You know, good, messy, ethnocentric humanity happily beavering away. The Commentaries are now very important documents for lots of people trying to interpret what happened after the Big Battle, although the Prophecy has receded somewhat in importance. Some new Commentaries have also been produced, reading the Prophecy in new terms.

Meanwhile, technology has improved. Clockwork magic has turned out to be a seriously cool thing, and produces lots of nifty machines. One of the big new powers, which didn’t even exist except as a forgotten atoll in the Champions’ day, is in fact run entirely by wizards who are expert with clockwork. These are the guys who found the Champions embedded in ice, in fact, and used magic to bring them back, frozen, to their atoll and revive them.

So what do the Champions do now? They no longer have a purpose, you see. Their entire lives were spent focusing on the Big Day and the Quest, and they succeeded. So what now? Why would they come back at all? If it’s all destiny and so on, what’s their destiny? What’s their purpose? What meanings do their lives have?

What’s At Stake
First of all, I thought this would be a fun way to do Exploration of the game-world. The High Fantasy part is sufficiently familiar that nobody who’s done stuff like AD&D and read genre fantasy is going to have any trouble with it. When the gang wakes up, they have to explore, because the world is so different, so there’s a good bit of consideration of the differences between the High Fantasy world they know and the weird new world they’re in.

Second, party unity is not initially going to be a problem, because again it’s predetermined and besides, after they wake up, who have they got but themselves? They know they can rely on each other, they know a lot about each other, and they know they’re the only ones who still remember the Old World.

Third, character development in the sense of improvement isn’t really an issue here, because these guys are still the baddest dudes around. Sure, magic throws a wrench into things, but these guys are so tough and powerful that they can pretty much carve through whatever gets in their way if that’s appropriate.

Fourth, the very fact that they can carve their way through means that they don’t always have to. I mean, if you run up against some local lord’s personal guard, and instead of fighting them your swordmaster just barbers some guy’s moustache and hair while he desperately and unsuccessfully tries to kill the swordmaster, you don’t really have to continue on and slaughter everyone. But you can, if you feel like it.

Fifth, these people are so powerful and so lacking in basic knowledge that they become obvious counters in everybody’s political games. If a power furthermore uses these guys’ status as the old Champions, this has huge ramifications. The point being that these guys are automatically the sorts of people around whom history itself changes drastically—but they don’t know anything about the history. So everybody cares about the PC’s, whether they themselves like it or not.

Sixth, I thought that the agony of seeking purpose and meaning, where before it had been so simple and clear, would be an exciting thing to grapple with. I don’t know if that leads to some sort of Premise, but I thought that might be something that develops over time, specific to each character.

Please note, incidentally: the two stages aren’t secret from the players or anything; they know more or less what you’ve just been told—all of it.

My Question, Again
What sort of system would work for this? My copy of TROS is in the mail, and that sounds like a plausible option, but what else might work well?

Are there other things I need to specify before that becomes at all an answerable question? This game seems to me to rest on the boundaries of Sim and Nar, but I’m not entirely sure about that.

Any suggestions?

Chris Lehrich

I think that's custom made for TROS. The Spiritual Attributes will be especially interesting. The Champions will have a collection of SAs geared towards killing the Demon King. Most of those will be N/A in phase 2, and the rest will apply to people and places that are long dead and gone. Questing around searching for appropriate SAs to replace them with ought to be worth the price of admission alone.

You won't find any direct support for clockwork magic, however. TROS magic can be easily adapted to Dark Sun Defiler kind of stuff, or Stygian Sorceries and the like. But it won't help you much with high fantasy magic.

I'd have thought, given the stupendous relative badassosity of these guys to the ordinary chap in the street, and the way you seem to be envisaging clockwork magic, that Nobilis was what you wanted.

[I feel really bad writing a reply this short].

Failing that, actually, HeroWars. It would probably require less tinkering than Nobilis. Or you could do it with Exalted, I suppose, but you'd be looking at a situation where you'd give each of your players a different castebook and say 'All These Charms Are Yours'.

I'd love to run Refreshing Rain in this setting. Its Color would need retooling, but otherwise it captures some things you seem to emphasize:

• The characters have stupendous badassosity.
• The characters' relationships with each other and with outsiders have escalating importance.
• It's more or less assumed that the characters can solve their problems; the question is how.

I'd retool it by using Tarot cards and a chessboard instead of Mah Jongg and Go; I'll post a discussion about de-Asianized Rain in Game Design presently.

clehrich wrote: What sort of system would work for this? My copy of TROS is in the mail, and that sounds like a plausible option, but what else might work well?

Are there other things I need to specify before that becomes at all an answerable question? This game seems to me to rest on the boundaries of Sim and Nar, but I’m not entirely sure about that.

Any suggestions?

BESM springs to mind. Seems to me that these guys are larger than life heros, who don't need a lot of character advancement, etc.

Important question. If everything has been taken away from the PCs, their homes, their families, etc, then what's their motivation? It seems to me that they're going to start as blank slates to an extent. Like Ralph says. The question is what are they going to be exposed to that they can grab onto? I mean, how can you ensure that you're going to be able to provide attractive stuff for the players?

In TROS, the players decide, and so you get a handle on what the character is about. Well, in this case, you're eliminating most of that (they might still have faith, or drives to be the "best" or somesuch). As such, how does the GM "replace" these things in terms of giving the players new things to hook onto. I think that you'd run the risk of "replacements". That is, if the PC had "PAssion : Love of Girlfriend", then I think the temptation would be to put more potential love interests in front of the character...

Do you see what I'm getting at? The normal process is to look at the SAs, and then make the NPCs from that. In this case, it would be like, look at the old SAs, and guess what the player is going to be interested in now. Which seems to have all sorts of potential problems.

Anyhow, I think the answer to the problem will tell us a lot about what system is best.

BTW, the whole thing sounds like a Feng Shui scenario, right down to the time shift and the villains. Off to attack the Ice Pagoda. That's right out of canon.


Oh, and if I were a player of this game, I'd want to start with waking up. The build up seems pointless to me if we know what happens. Maybe each player could write their trek as part of their background, but playing it would seem a pantomime.

Mike

Ralph, Drew, Shreyas, John, Loki:

Thanks for the suggestions! Loki, could you explain a bit why Nobilis? From what I’ve heard of it, it seems like an odd choice.

Mike:

If everything has been taken away from the PCs, their homes, their families, etc, then what's their motivation? It seems to me that they're going to start as blank slates to an extent.

How does the GM "replace" these things in terms of giving the players new things to hook onto.

Oh, and if I were a player of this game, I'd want to start with waking up. The build up seems pointless to me if we know what happens. Maybe each player could write their trek as part of their background, but playing it would seem a pantomime.

I agree that the first part is rather important to the entirety of the game. There's a big difference between:

"O.K., you guys went through these years of training, and then you faced this quest, where you got to know each other, and each other's abilities, pretty well, and bonded through your ordeal, and then fell together to what you expected would be your deaths, the best of the best dying as they defeat the worst enemy humanity has ever faced. But now you're waking up again to meet a different world....

Chris, you wrote: This game seems to me to rest on the boundaries of Sim and Nar, but I’m not entirely sure about that.

M. J. Young wrote: Anyway, I'm persuaded that setting/situation is sufficiently part of system that you can design a system which is inherently drifted by the setting/situation elements, and that Multiverser does that to a significant degree. You want a mild low-risk gamism in the first part (simulationism my eye--your heroes can't die until the climactic moment, and then they can't survive; they aren't going to bury Shimoro's body in the snow and continue on their way). Later you want something that can be shifted into narrativism if the players start latching on to the real issues of their displacement.

It's a cool idea overall that could make a fascinating story, and I'll bet it would play well if you can get the system to drift accordingly.

It was me who suggested Nobilis. I admit, it's a bit of an odd one, but it seemed to cover the 'archetypal agents of civilisation' thing quite well. Admittedly, they'd be without a Manse, initially, I suspect, but they could revive their civilisations. I feel I must point out that I don't actually own Nobilis, so I'm operating on secondhand information, but I can't help but feel that there could be value in the slightly jarring disconnect implied in using rules for demigods for these survivors of a dead age. Which might be nice.

clehrich wrote: So now they have to learn what the rest of us always had to learn: to make choices, to accept the possibility of error, to bear responsibility. Because they never had any real responsibility, either: Why did you do X? Prophecy said so, that’s why. So now they have to become real people, or try to, and also try to figure out what the hell they’re going to do with their fantastically focused personalities and frankly incredible ass-kicking abilities. All of which doesn’t make it a lot easier. So the answer to your question is: “Yes, exactly.”

How does the GM "replace" these things in terms of giving the players new things to hook onto.

Ideally, he doesn’t. He provides possibilities and lets the PC’s find things to get obsessed about.

Oh, and if I were a player of this game, I'd want to start with waking up. The build up seems pointless to me if we know what happens. Maybe each player could write their trek as part of their background, but playing it would seem a pantomime.

I totally disagree...

On top of everything else, how can you do this to the characters? I mean, they spend their entire lives on this one thing, and they're ultra, ultra-trained for this one purpose, and you're going to hand-wave it? C'mon!

Come on, Mike. I wasn't ridiculing you, I'm not trying to give you a hard time. I happen to disagree, and I thought that was worth discussion. The thread was, and is, about what sort of system might work well for this setting.

As you say, I'll try again.

Mike Holmes wrote: OK, here I am with this character, and I have no goals. The GM says, "What do you do next?" And I just sit there because I have no idea what the character would do next. In fact, I'm pretty sure the character would just look for something to eat. I mean, beyond survival, where does the character go?

That's precisely the same thing I'm talking about. How do you decide what "possibilities" to put in front of the character?

In your game, I guess I just throw random stuff out there and see what sticks? What if, as a player none of it seems interesting? Blame the GM?

What I'm looking for are ways for the player to communicate to the GM what he's interested in seeing other than just waiting for something interesting to come along, and then jumping on it if/when that happens.

You disagree that I would want to start with waking up? Gee, glad to know you understand me better than I do.

Now, MJ talks about bonding. That's potentially a good enough reason if it weren't for the fact that I think you can either A) just say that the characters are bonded, or B) mechanically represent this and thereby make it fact.

clehrich wrote: So where’s the Reign of the Sun? What the hell happened? Well, this depends on the culture.

• One culture thinks the Sun is here, now, and that everyone who doesn’t see this is simply wrong.
• One culture thinks the whole thing was a monstrous mistake, and they worship the Demon King, who they claim never died anyway. The names of the Champions are now used as swear-words.
• One culture thinks the whole Reign of the Sun thing is actually a linguistic error – it just mean eternal lack of the Demon King, and nothing more.
• One culture thinks that the Demon King was only the physical manifestation of a larger force of evil, that the business about 1500 years was referring only to the first part of the whole thing, and that history itself will re-cycle on a grander scale, where the Champions are no longer necessary, and therefore this culture should go out and stomp anyone who might be on the wrong side, as indicated by their unwillingness to recognize the obvious truth.

And so on. You know, good, messy, ethnocentric humanity happily beavering away. The Commentaries are now very important documents for lots of people trying to interpret what happened after the Big Battle, although the Prophecy has receded somewhat in importance. Some new Commentaries have also been produced, reading the Prophecy in new terms.

Meanwhile, technology has improved. Clockwork magic has turned out to be a seriously cool thing, and produces lots of nifty machines. One of the big new powers, which didn’t even exist except as a forgotten atoll in the Champions’ day, is in fact run entirely by wizards who are expert with clockwork. These are the guys who found the Champions embedded in ice, in fact, and used magic to bring them back, frozen, to their atoll and revive them.

cruciel wrote: I can't help wonder if this is something you want to focus on. Determining which one of these is true? Maybe some sort of building pool, maybe even tied to character decisions in the original Big Battle. Like pitching one of four different colored tokens in the pot everytime something is encountered that points to one of the four, then counting up all the tokens during the end-game and deciding what actually happened... I dunno, just brainstorming.

I'm not sure how much crunch you want, but I'd second Mike's suggestion of Feng Shui.

Oh, and I might steal your idea and subject the other players in my group to it in some fashion. ;)

clehrich wrote:

cruciel wrote: I can't help wonder if this is something you want to focus on. Determining which one of these is true? Maybe some sort of building pool, maybe even tied to character decisions in the original Big Battle. Like pitching one of four different colored tokens in the pot everytime something is encountered that points to one of the four, then counting up all the tokens during the end-game and deciding what actually happened... I dunno, just brainstorming.

On this one, I was pretty much thinking that there isn't an answer. Sort of like, "Which God is the right one?" I quite like human society as just a bunch of messiness with people taking things terribly seriously; when you know the answers, fanaticism can be totally justified.

I want to look into this, certainly, but can you tell me a bit more about it? I sort of had the impression it was doing Hong Kong cinema or something, but it sounds like I have that way wrong. What's the shtick?

Feel free. Let me know how it comes out, though!

Mike Holmes wrote: This isn't a movie (as John Kim points out) it's an RPG. I want to participate in the parts in which I get to create more than just dialog for my character, I want to be in the parts where I create plot. If the plot is known, I can't do that. So it's just not interesting to me to play out. Read, as an intro, or even write? Sure. Play? No.

But feel free to correct me on what I like to play again.

Mike Holmes wrote: Obviously that's the idea behind the game. And I never said it isn't interesting, either. I just said it's going to be hard to play. I mean, OK, here I am with this character, and I have no goals. The GM says, "What do you do next?" And I just sit there because I have no idea what the character would do next. In fact, I'm pretty sure the character would just look for something to eat. I mean, beyond survival, where does the character go?
...
What I'm looking for are ways for the player to communicate to the GM what he's interested in seeing other than just waiting for something interesting to come along, and then jumping on it if/when that happens. What I see is a group with some engaged players and others not, and the not engaged players resenting the engaged ones.

John Kim wrote: That said, I foresee a problem with your setup, Chris. Part 2 seems to me to be too broad in Scope -- so it will be difficult for you to have any prepared depth to it. It would be better, IMO, if there were some sort of microcosm. Perhaps there is a city which is an international central city that arose on the former site of the Demon King's lair? That way you can have all sorts of factions within the city detailed, rather than having the PCs wander around a less well-detailed world through many cities.

clehrich wrote:

John Kim wrote: That said, I foresee a problem with your setup, Chris. Part 2 seems to me to be too broad in Scope -- so it will be difficult for you to have any prepared depth to it. It would be better, IMO, if there were some sort of microcosm. Perhaps there is a city which is an international central city that arose on the former site of the Demon King's lair? That way you can have all sorts of factions within the city detailed, rather than having the PCs wander around a less well-detailed world through many cities.

Well, I was certainly going to have a very complicated starting city with lots of factions, but I hadn't thought of putting it on the South Pole. Why there? I'm not quite following, I think.

Gotcha. Entirely by accident, I had much of this in mind; it's nice to know it seems like it might work, since I didn't really plan it this way.

The place they wake up is the weird city run by clockwork magicians, which has spent its roughly 500 years of existence trying to be a kind of combination Switzerland and U.N. Everyone uses them as a neutral zone for conversation and diplomacy (and also vicious intrigue), and they figure that it's pretty effective because these guys are very rich and have lots of magic power that nobody else really understands all that well. Besides, outside their local area, they have no power at all, as their total population is sufficiently small that any of the larger empires have standing armies with more people. They're not allied to anyone (and if they tried to become so would rapidly be stomped by others), but they're not enemies of anyone (do you really want to invade a vast citadel run by magicians with incomprehensible infernal machines?), and they stand in an uncomfortable but exciting central position for all the big players in world politics.

So in fact, the starting-point city really is a representative of everywhere, a kind of Lankhmar that's a bit more organized and a New York that's a little less American and so on and so forth.

Cool. I can actually use that!

Chris Lehrich

clehrich wrote: Come on, Mike. I wasn't ridiculing you, I'm not trying to give you a hard time. I happen to disagree, and I thought that was worth discussion. The thread was, and is, about what sort of system might work well for this setting.

If they just sit around waiting, there's more of a problem, which I thought was what you were describing before.

Let me try this from a different angle. I'm trying to construct a backstory that says, "You are 100% a party, in the classic sense, and you're pretty solid with that. Despite the fact that you really don't have any actual interests, you apparently think your interests lie in common." If I simply announce this, or do it through mechanics, this is the old, "Well, you've got PC on your forehead so you must be one of my gang." I'd rather play it than militate it. You apparently would prefer otherwise.

Point of thread: What system is good for this?
Your point: I don't like this setting.
My point: I don't care. I do like this setting. Some others do too, apparently.

Hmmm. I'm not sure I see what the sticking point is for you on this one Mike.

I think the idea is a pretty bang up one. Part II seems just like a Troll Babe adventure. The characters are going to be drawn into things bigger than themselves whether they want to be or not because of who they are. In Troll babe its because of her relationship to both trolls and humans. For this, its because of the prophecy.


What I would recommend, however, is to make Part I not completely irrelevant. I'd have what and how the champions do in Part 1 determine the chinese menu of how the world works in Part 2. I'd have this pretty programmed in along the lines of:

examples: Say one of the key killer spells in the world is "the power of the sun" which is kind of like a sunlight fireball that can be pumped up for more damage based on how powerful the caster is. Since this guy is THE Champion spell guy, he can pump it up to never before seen levels to dish out massive destruction. In the game make sure that there are opponents suitably dangerous to tempt the player into doing so. Unbenownst to them, however, that pulling too much power into the spell will actually permanently dim the sun.

Or perhaps the big bad has a pet serpent, defeatable, by the party but tough enough to weaken them prior to the final battle, and which isn't tactically necessary to confront...its locked in a cell and can be simply by passed.


When they start to wander around the world after waking up then they'll hear things like:

"It used to be much warmer, but that was before the Champions of prophecy journeyed to the southern citadel. In their hubris they believed themselves powerful enough to challenge even the gods and worked such mighty magics that the sun grew dim. Now our world is cold and many go hungry".

"Yes, the Champions slew the evil demon lord. But they failed to slay his pet serpent. After the fall of the citadel, the serpent was free and tormented the southern kingdoms. Thousands of square miles were laid waste by its depravations and 10s of thousands slaughtered by the creature which the careless Champions let loose upon the world"


So in this way Part 1 isn't completely irrelevant. I'd have a good 2 or 3 dozen things that could be wrong with the world when the champions awake and find ways to tie them directly into simple binary choices the Champions made in the Citadel. Some may not even make much sense but be accepted as truth in the manner of long oral tradition "The forest of Roos burned to the ground because the champions chose to go right instead of left at the fork"...and of course the forest DID burn to the ground because of the party went right....or pulled the wrong lever, or didn't open the second door, or removed the gem of power, or didn't rescue the princess...or better DID rescue the princess (who turned into a mad tyrant), etc.

If you're real ambitious I'd even write a whole series of nostradamus type prophecies where each of these elements is vaguely aluded to along with the right or wrong responce..."Lean on the sun with restraint lest its power be insufficient to sustain both you and the world"...that sort of thing.

That way, when they come out and see everything that happened you can tie all of the ways that the world went to shit back into them not doing a good enough job in the citadel.

At that point, Part II should pretty much take off. Players may start to try to fix the problems they caused. They may say "screw it" and just knock off their tormentors figuring they can run things better any way...any number of things that probably will result in the party splitting and breaking up and even winding up on opposite sides.

Sounds like a blast actually.

I'd be tempted to run it using Savage Worlds...which has the same leveling up paradigm as D20 but which can handle super high power levels much quicker than trying to run a combat of 20th level types, and then graft a TROS-esque SA system on to it, where the reward was bennies instead of SA points.

Its perfect for tactical dungeon hacks like part 1 and fairly transparent enough to not bog down Part II with unnecessarily complex record keeping.

I'm with Ralph on this one. I don't really see what the problem is. Sure, many things wouldn't be relevant in Part 2, but plenty of things definitely WOULD be. Sure, everything the heroes knew is gone, but they can still find equivilent things in which they can invest themselves. Maybe they can't protect a specific kingdom, but they could protect the remnant of the kingdom (which may have grown corrupt and may not be worthy of protection) or a kingdom that claims to hold similar values. There's plenty of stuff that could serve as character motivation. You just draw on the character's specified past in order to create relavant situations in the present.

The whole setup reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy 3 (or maybe it was 5?) on the Super Nintendo. You started out running around in these super powerful battlesuits that did more damage than anything else in the game. But then you fought the main baddie and got toasted. The whole rest of the game was spent working back up to the power level of the battlesuits in an effort to take on the baddie and actually win. There are many Japanese video games that start with a very similar premise to this. Zelda 2 for the N64 was the same. You fight the bad guy, lose, and then spend the rest of the game traveling through time and eventually end up back at the point where you started, prepared to beat the baddie this time.

Valamir wrote: Hmmm. I'm not sure I see what the sticking point is for you on this one Mike.

I think the idea is a pretty bang up one. Part II seems just like a Troll Babe adventure. The characters are going to be drawn into things bigger than themselves whether they want to be or not because of who they are. In Troll babe its because of her relationship to both trolls and humans. For this, its because of the prophecy.

To add to, or echo, Johnathan and Ralph...

I would say that the more investment in the things that are gone, the better. If you chose to go with TROS, then this would be elegant - you send 'em into the final conflict with some way pumped SAs, only one of which is as simple as "Destiny: Defeat the Demon King," the rest of which are interesting and specific Conscience, Faith, Passion, etc. variants, tying them heavily to the world they've just come to defend. It's elegant because this would, itself, make them frightening... because these SA are pretty much all firing, that's the point, that's the setup. So your badassinest champions are even more so, because the rules weight SAs as they do.

Then, when they wake up, they have all these maxed SAs - to things that don't exist anymore, or exist only in the most distorted fashion.

This doesn't leave them hanging. Far from it. Those directed passions now provide exactly the hooks Mike is failing to see, through their lack of relevance in this world.

• Loss - the object of the passion is gone, forever, and the character is now informed by the discovery, the desperate search for remnants, and the sorrow of the loss. Nations, obviously, but also subtler things like the cultural mores that make up Conscience. Where did all the innocents go? Where's the fairer sex? Esp. for a samurai-type, what happened to loyalty as a virtue?• Reversal - the object of the passion still exists in a technical sense, but no longer stands for what it did... it's now worth fighting against instead of for. This may or may not be clear at first, of course.• Repair - the object could be reinstated or returned to a shadow of its former glory, but the task is massively complicated by the changes in the world. This would be a good fit for Faith, for example.• Reinterpretation - the champion may find something which matches the essence of what he once held dear, and take that to be the "modern equivalent." Transferral of loyalty is a powerful hook, especially if the fit isn't perfect or there was deception involved (possibly deliberate, if a student of history is involved).• Adaptation - giving up what is lost, as lost, and taking on drives relevant to this world instead.

Really, the higher those old passions are, the more interesting part two becomes, because the contrasts are so much stronger. Which doesn't mean that the SAs themselves are relevant in their statistical role... we had enough of that in part one. But even that still drives things in a gamist sense... do you sacrifice your existing SAs in order to change, or do you hang onto those potent strengths for the rare occasions that they do become relevant?

Me, I'd say go straight TROS, all the way.

- Eric

(Edited once due to crossposting with Mike)

I may be being ridiculous here.

What if you played (at least some of) Part 2 first? You can start out with characters that have basically no cultural background, just some kind of wierd schtick (which is explicitly anachronistic in the world of P2), and in play you allow them to define the cultures that they are carrying with them from the past - and along with that, the impact that those ancient cultures have had on the present. Off the top of my head I can think of some really strange, paradoxical things that can come of this, but also things that could be really cool.

I like Ralph's idea for prophecies that vaguely warn of how game actions in part one are going to impact the world in part two.

I also liked what John (I think) said about the fact that these characters now see the world of which they are the heroes. It reminds me of a world I've got in development. The player character is given the opportunity to save the world in a medieval setting by successfully completing a quest; the quest isn't actually that hard, so as long as he agrees to do it and doesn't do anything stupid, he'll probably succeed. (What else he does to help save the world is the more interesting part of play, really.) Then, after he's died and been somewhere else and died a few more times, he comes back to a modern world, and finds his own statue in a museum, a record of his past victory now mythic legend over which scholars debate--he's both famous and presumed at best exaggerated, at worse non-existent. Having the player characters return in your scenario to find their statues commemorating their ancient success would be a fun hook, particularly as this would tend to lead to recognition by the people they encounter, at least sometimes.

As far as my assessment that part one is gamist, it's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game--and in this case, it's about being flamboyant, about showing off your character's kewl stuff. Ever run a game in which the players knew that their characters were immortal? They tend to cut loose quite a bit as they get used to it. These players are playing the best of the best, and we want them to approach most of the fights with a cocky confidence because they know they're not destined to die here--they're destined to die when they face the ice demon himself, and not before. Thus they've got the context in which to show off what they can do. This gives us the knight who offers his opponent the first blow before killing him, the martial artist who sets down his weapons and invites the adversary to do the same. It encourages them to create flash.

It also occurs to me in this context that within this is another reason for the value of part one. In part one, the characters are invulnerable (well, not quite--they can be hurt, they can't be killed), and if played thus they should develop a sort of cocky attitude. When they awaken in the future, what happens to that cocky attitude? Some of them may think themselves completely immortal--after all, they've even cheated death. Some may suddenly find themselves extremely vulnerable--they aren't even supposed to be alive now, how can they think they will survive another day? However, the characters will have established patterns of behavior, and (this is the important bit) the players patterns of play, that cause them to act as if they think themselves invulnerable.

Interesting.

--M. J. Young

Silly thought, possibly indicative of the type of system you want: It seems to me that what you need is, in TRoS-y terms, meta SAs.

Each character has a number of meta-SAs, broad classes of things that can engage the character to the point of developing an SA. In part one, many (not necessarily all!) these meta-SAs have instantiated SAs. The character goes into the climactic battle with all of these SAs firing.

Cue part 2. The SAs have all died with the Demon King, but the meta-SAs are still around, waiting for some appropriate aspect of the new environment to let them re-instantiate. As these aspects occur in play, the characters gradually re-develop SAs.

The advantages of having these explicit in the system are that,


• All PC-players will be clear that they need to consider these things,
• The GM-player, by knowing the set of meta-SAs will know what sort of stimuli are needed to give the characters new SAs.
• It is now possible to have a character switch tacks significantly in a plausible way, by having one or more uninstantiated meta-SAs in part 1 that do instantiate in part 2.



SR
--

Many thanks to everyone! (Especially Mike, actually, who among other things prompted some of the most exciting ideas for this that I hadn't thought of at all....)

I think I'm going to borrow Ralph's basic concept of having stuff that happens in Part 1 turn out to be big issues in the later world. Suddenly all that dungeon-hack-romp stuff has bite. Turns out it wasn't all fun and games like they sort of thought it was.

I just got my copy of TROS, and started running some combat simulations (love the little download program for this!). If you've never done it, try creating a way-cranked character and have him fight some mediocrities. It's sick and wrong, but there's a weird sort of pleasure in figuring out what's the fastest way to kill someone really messily without getting any on you. I'm adoring the fact that a super-samurai type can go Defense, then Counter, then slaughter, while a super-axeman can just say the hell with it and blast through some poor sap's piddling defenses (very messy, brains and limbs everywhere, etc.). If you have a little gang of these supermen romping through a dungeon that really isn't all that hard, all things considered, they're probably not going to pay a lot of attention to detail along the way, because they're having so much fun slaying in elegant ways and cracking wise at each other.

This produces several things:
1. They don't really realize what long-term consequences there are, so there are lots of hooks;
2. They learn the combat system, which strikes me as a worthwhile point right there;
3. They develop personal styles and shticks; and
4. They get in the habit of using those SA's every time something really serious happens.

Once we get to part 2, all those huge SA's need to be put to use, so the gang will almost necessarily start looking for things to latch them on to. I hadn't really realized this about TROS: if the point of your SA goes away, as I understand it, the points usually vanish; in this game, the points don't vanish, but you have to find something relevant to attach them to or they start degrading fast. Thus there is HUGE incentive to go find something to care a lot about.

As someone pointed out, this might very well lead them to do crazy things, and because everyone cares about everything they do automatically, they're going to find themselves in very sticky situations very quickly.

I think I just have to memorize TROS and collate my notes, and I'm good to go. Actually the clockwork magic thing isn't going to be very hard, because (as in TROS) this stuff is really very powerful and alien, and not something normal people (including the Champions, actually) are messing with; it's usually just a question of being able to buy some magic gizmo that presses your pants, and if it gets used in combat or something it might as well be TROS sorcery. Much hacking and agonizing will ensue....

Thanks, everybody!

Chris Lehrich

Your initial experiences with TROS are classic, and your comments had me chuckling. :-)

The post sounded like you were closing the thread, so, at the risk of prolonging it...

clehrich wrote: This produces several things:
1. They don't really realize what long-term consequences there are, so there are lots of hooks;

Mike Holmes wrote:

clehrich wrote: 1. They don't really realize what long-term consequences there are, so there are lots of hooks;

The thing is that, if I understand correctly, the players will know what the repercussions are. Not to sound anti-author stance, but how do you think they'll handle that?

Yes, the power of SAs work in your favor to incentivize players to grab onto something, and this works in your favor. But I wonder if it's not overly powerful in a way. I mean, looking at the demise of all that the characters hold dear, wouldn't you switch to things that are more generic like the standard "Be the Best" Drive? Meaning that when you get to part two, I think that the players will have a full set of useable SAs - they just won't have anything to do with the current setting (I'm seeing lots of Luck).

That is, if I was going off to certain doom, I'd probably make my peace with the current world, represented by dropping all of those SAs on the way to the palace.

I'd just like to add that someone better lose an eye or something in part one.

Scars, complete exhaustion of magical power, or quirky magical flaws from the big battle with the demon king would help connect part one and two for the players, and give part one more meaning.

I'd probably let the players choose ("I dim the sun!", "I lose an eye!", "My tongue permanently turns to flame!", "I have the demon king's arm because he chopped off mine and I attached his mid battle!", etc), but other people might enjoy surprises more.