The Forge Archives

At last, at last! Simon, Chris, Linda and I got together for our first game of Universalis last night. Despite the usual uphill battle of explaining concepts and rules, it went very well, with lots of cool free-association world design and the first couple of scenes of what will likely be a very neat story.

There was a fair amount of clumsiness in terms of handling time - stopping for explanations or to look up rules or to discuss options - but as Chris pointed out that should disappear when we become more familiar with the rules. I'm not immune - I just checked and realised (as I suspected last night) that I got the rules for Challenges wrong, and they are actually much simpler to resolve than I made them. And record keeping was difficult, especially with trying to keep track of new characters and their traits as they appeared in the story, as well as tracking the narrative and dialogue for posterity. We concluded last night that the idea of keeping each Component on its own file card and then stacking like Components together (Characters with Characters, Locations with Locations etc) was the way to go. It belatedly occurs to me that another way to have reduced the handling time would have been to have a second record keeper actually recording the events of the story itself. That should make things easier next time, and give me more of a chance to focus on the narrative.

One thing that surprised me was Master Components, which I really had not got a grip on well just from reading the rulebook. But when it came to describing the characteristics of the various different races in the story, I suddenly Got It. The rules are really very intuitive (when used correctly - ahem!) and quite versatile.

In terms of the actual story, the setting evolved from a jumble of elements including or similar to Dinotopia, Victorian-era class and race conflict, jungle frontier exploration and clockwork punk. The heroine is the arrogant surveyor, Lady Larissa Montgibbon, who has arrived by train in the frontier settlement of Basquieph, ably assisted by her dwarf maidservant, her spidron lackey and Knuckles, a ten-year-old grifter and his pet dinosaur Shredsy, and opposed by the sinister forces of hide-bound bureaucracy and arrogant superiority in the snooty form of the pedantic elf Snyder.

One thing about last night's game is that, apart from a pecking-order confrontation between Snyder and Lady Larissa (which Chris won, narrating the character's petty officiousness to hilarious effect and effectively making him a significant antagonist for Larissa), not a lot actually happened. All day I have been making sinister plans to up the stakes with several new characters and a series of Complications. What is cool about making all these plans, however, is that at any moment they can be foiled by something one of the others comes up with that will completely change the thrust of the story, and make my schemes irrelevant. I really can't wait for that to happen.

Some of the best moments of inspiration:

-When Simon Introduced Lady Larissa and gave her the Role of "Surveyor".

- Chris' dismissive Dialogue for Snyder, who has just informed Lady Larissa that her papers are not in order and she will have to return the next day: "Please take notice of the signs regarding the treatment of loiterers and vagrants. Sleep well."

- Linda's haughty Dialogue for the embarrassed Lady Larissa: "Things aren't like this where I'm from!"

Brilliant game. I want more. More! MORE!

Note: This has been a modification of my http://www.otherleg.com/lexifab/lexifab.html blog entry, so forgive the somewhat elementary commentary on certain aspects of the game and actual play. I was just too lazy to type out separate observations for the two fora.

Hey Dave, sounds great.
FYI I tried to check out your blog, but kept getting scripting error messages.  I did manage to read a rousing tale of your epic cricket game...which was absolute gibberish to me but it sounded like a great game ;-)

I noted you'd earlier passed up a game of Universalis for A View to a Kill.  I can forgive you that, because unlike you, it was one of my favorite Bond movies.  But only because of Christopher Walkin...and the scene where Grace Jones stranges his chauffer.

BTW check out the new essay on the website, and see if that would have helped with the initial learning curve teaching the game.

Shredsy. Sweet. I can hear the name being said in a little boy voice with a victorian accent. Sweet.

Keep us posted if at all possible! The atmosphere of the game seems rife with colorful conflict.

Mike

Ralph, the essay was/would have been perfect! If only I'd waited 24 hours <grin>, I wouldn't have got the Challenge rules wrong, and I would have remembered that Simon should have had his Bid Coins to spend on describing the opening scene. Which on paper sounds like it would have kinda shafted him, but I notice that he still somehow ended up with more Coins than me...

Seriously, it is an excellent reference, which I have now sent to all the players along with the play aid. And I hope to drag a couple of new players into a game shortly (one is my non-gamer wife), so I will give them a field test and report back.

Mike, Shredsy's name was one of those sudden "I've started talking and I have no idea what I'm going to say" moments of inspiration. It almost took the wind out of my sails when Linda pointed out that I had already described it as a "mini-iguanodon" ie a herbivore, but I recovered by hotly insisting that of course I knew that, but Knuckles is ignorant of such distinctions and gave him a fierce-sounding name!

Oh, and off-topic: Yeah, Christopher Walken was the only reason we watched it at all. But the absolutely colourless Tanya Roberts, a visibly aged Roger Moore and the hideous comedic interplay between Bond and Patrick MacNee's character - ugh! I almost proposed (to bring this back on topic) that we tell a Bond story and endeavour to make it better than View, but the experience had left us too scarred...