Differences

Just a short post about a random thought I had after class, yesterday. Pardon the ramble. I'm trying to understand something, here.

As I peruse my Google+ feed, I am struck, quite often, by how differently the people in my circles pursue gaming than how I do. Part of what I find remarkable is that there are a lot of games that just don't grab my interests in the ways they seem to interest others. For some folks, it seems like the best part of gaming is having a deep and complex character, and a system that allows for exploration of that character's identity, relationships other PCs and NPCs, and the like. Some players like to have a lot of narrative control, and enjoy games that allow shared responsibility for how the game narrative unfolds. They really dig working with (not against) the referee, or having no referee at all. Some people enjoy things like LARPing. Some dig card-based deck-building games. Some are boardgame fanatics. The list goes on. Sometimes it's differences in mechanics and sometimes in setting. Sometimes it's about the rewards they get, and how they are received. In short, there are a lot of people who really have a great time with things that I don't really find particularly interesting. That is their Awesome.

There was a time when I might have thought of those differences as reasons to hate or mock those people, or to despise those games and the people who play them. I'm long past that point in my life. I'm glad that people enjoy their games, and I'm happy they've found friends and companions to join them on their journey in life. I watch them from a distance, with abstracted joy for their happiness, but no real connection to it. I revel (intellectually) in the fact of its existence, but care little for the substance, and remain disengaged from their lives and pursuits. I have my own things, and I like them, because they are my Awesome. The existence of these differences, though, causes me to question why I like what I do.

Even with people I game with and am close to, this is a thing. I care little, anymore, for much of the Warhammer ethos. It bores me. I could list a bunch of things I don't really care about, but the only real reason I have for not digging it is that it doesn't have the Awesome, anymore, that speaks to my inner being. Likewise, I am weary of weirdness for the sake of weirdness. I understand that it's easy to get bored for the same old tropes and stories, and to want to push the envelope into new territory. I get that. Nonetheless, it seems more reactionary than revolutionary when the result seems more a commentary on standard fantasy tropes than a departure from them. I'm sure others could look at what I like, and suggest why they don't like it. That's cool. That's right.

Me? I'm pretty boring, I think. My approach to gaming is probably pretty unremarkable, because I'm not bored with old mechanics (though I like to play with new variations on them). I don't mind the old GM-driven RPGs, and am not particularly interested in a lot of the things that newer styles of games pursue. FATE, for example, seems like too much work. I don't care for it, though I understand how others could like it, and I appreciate how it does what it does. I saw someone trashing on steampunk the other day, and I could see where he was coming from, but I hate the idea of doing that instead of, for example, simply driving on by without honking if you don't like it. Nobody cares what you hate, and particularly the people who like that thing. It just seems like picking a fight with some kid you don't know, just to be a dick. I'm not interested in being like that, not anymore.

Here's where I think I may depart from some people. I like the grand scope, the epic tale. I like to see what the same-old-same-old looks like if you take it seriously. Not grimly. Not weirdly. Seriously. I don't mind standard fantasy, but I'd like it to be more... real. More human. I want conflict. I want characters and peoples with motivations that are complex and contradictory. I want war. I want death. I want to kill things and take their stuff, but I also want hope, and life, and to build things worth having. I want every adventure to have an impact on the world, however small. I want my characters to be invested in things, not simply viewing them with ironic detachment, or treating them as disposable. My vision of the Awesome is beautiful and flawed, always in the process of becoming, always breaking and falling into ruin. Death in this world is permanent, and irrevocable, but the world itself goes on and on, and life persists. There is always hope for tomorrow to be better, even if it probably won't be.

How I'd like to get there, though, is not to have my character figured out from the start. I want to be surprised. I want events to define my character. This is true, also, of my world, as GM. I want the divine randomness of the dice to drive those events. At the same time, I'd like to have a world that, even if I don't know everything about it, has a human(ish) logic. The NPCs and factions have their reasons, and pursue their own interests, even if they seem irrational from the outside. Shit happens as a result of those NPCs and factions bumping up against each other (and the PCs). I like (as a GM) to see the ripples of cause and effect spreading out from what (if static) would be really elegant and simple statements of places, and statuses, and motivations (e.g., standard tropes and narratives). But they are not static. The cause and effect becomes chaos and new orders, and the PCs find themselves trying to impose their feeble wills on things they cannot control, though sometimes they are able, for a while, to find a place of peace and security, and to feel a sense of accomplishment. More than anything, I want to play in a game where what happens, matters. Here's the difference though: It matters because that's how things ended up, where they are now, temporarily, and just not how it all was conceived from the start.

Example: In a class I teach, we are using a fantasy/colonial simulation as the basis of an advanced public speaking course. The students are colonial leaders split into three factions, and have recently been approached by a tribe who wishes their alliance against a hated foe. They investigated the situation. Yesterday, as I stepped to the lectern, I needed a story. So I told them this, making it up as I went.

The tribe to the south lives in an area of foothills and mountains. Though they farm, they are mainly herders. Recent droughts have made them desperate, and their numbers are dwindling (but still formidable). They have a priest-king, and worship death. There is a lot of iconography featuring ravens. They put their dead on exposure platforms, because they believe that otherwise they would become skin-walkers. They believe that the purpose of life is a glorious death, and part of their worship is in killing and conquering. They wish to annihilate utterly their foes to the north. They also believe the colonists are prophesied to make that possible, and desire an alliance to make war on their enemies to the north. [Note: the colony lies between the southern and northern tribe]

The tribe to the north are farmers and fishers. They worship the sun. Their society is peaceful and fecund. They engage in human sacrifice. The sacrifices are chosen through an elaborate set of activities including games, merit calculations, quotas, and other things. The colonists find them all but indecipherable and utterly alien. They believe that their task is to preserve the natural cycle, and that the tribe to the south (which they associate with the sun's foe, the moon) is part of that cycle. They recognize that the rain is sent by the witchcraft of the moon-tribe to blot out the sun. However, the rain also allows for the sun to bring new life to the land, so it is both necessary and desirable that their enemies be allowed to persist. They will only fight a defensive war, and will not ally to take on the southern tribe.

Caught in the middle, the colonists have the choice either to pick a tribe, or to stay out of the conflict. Any choice they make will have consequences, and those will have further consequences. I have no idea what will happen, but I will be sure that  the consequences remain consistent with the beliefs and motivations of those involves. New facets of each tribe will emerge in the unfolding of the story, usually logically but sometimes in ways that create new tensions.

I have no idea what will happen next. The class factions will have a series of debates and then they will vote to pursue some course of action. I don't care who wins. I don't care who loses. The world will go on. The choices they make, the choices I make, and the choices ordained by their choices, and the dice, and they all will combine to tell us what happens.

Note: The outcome will also influence what happens in my Lacuna Locurae campaign setting, which is maybe 100 years in the future of the classroom-based scenario/simulation.

My love of this dynamic of randomness and order, and waiting to see what happens next, is why I don't think I could ever abandon the use of dice in gaming. It's also why I LOVE the DCC funnel conception (rather than the more recent "character-concept" or "character-build" conception) of character generation. I don't want special characters. I want special stories and special worlds to help me find characters worth knowing. This is part of the reason I'm so fascinated with +Adam Muszkiewicz's recent brushes with emergent character generation. +Doug Kovacs also does this to some extent. It's also why I think I've grown away from setting that assume happy (or grim) endings as inevitable, and that good and evil (or law and chaos) are somehow mutually exclusive, or easy to differentiate. It's also why I don't feel fettered by resort to standard fantasy (or sci-fi, or horror, or... whatever) tropes and situations. They are only starting points, and they are Made to Be Broken.

Poison Idea--Made to Be Broken

What I like in my games is not what everyone else wants, and I'm cool with that (as if it matters what I think about somebody else's fun). I just want it to be Awesome. Individual results may vary. 

I Need a Dervish Class

Riffing off of yesterday's post, here's a passage from a book I'm currently reading for my research on the Ottomans:

It was among the dervishes that the babas, scantily clad in animal pelts, with their shaven heads and fondness for loud music, were welcomed with the fewest reservations. (p. 23)

Sounds like punks and metalheads (those who all liked speed and thrash metal, at least) back in the day.

Makes me think I need to create a dervish class for DCC. The baba class might follow, but I think that the Savage class I wrote for last year's Secret Santicore (Vol. 1, I think) would fit that particular bill. Heck, it might do the job for both of these, but I think the dervish would be a bit more like a specialized paladin/sage type.

Reference

Faroqui, S. (2007). Subjects of the sultan: Culture and daily life in the Ottoman empire. London: I. B. Tauris.

Lacuna Locurae: What is this fantasy/colonial thing?

Lately, I've been reading a lot of historical sources to  inspire my thinking about the Lacuna Locurae setting, the island of Magyaru (on which one finds the Imperial port city of the same name). Now, loosely speaking, the Empire is an extension of the Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad campaign, but there's a slippage in both style and chronology. Though we're dealing with sort of an "eternal now" approach, with characters from that setting moving back and forth between the campaigns, the "real" time frame is a few hundred years in the future. In European historical terms, we've moved from the medieval times to Renaissance/early-modern times. This is more an issue of technology, context, and tone than it is anything approaching historical accuracy. I'm not aiming to recreate European history, here, but to select elements of various colonial histories that I find interesting and useful for running a game. For this purpose, I've selected several broad models:

• England
• Spain
• France
• Rome
• Ottoman Turkey

Again, the goal is not to make them historically accurate, but to cash in on the things that made those colonial powers, and the issues they faced, interesting. Some examples:

The three-headed monster that colonized the Americas (England, France, and Spain) provided some interesting fodder for the setting.

• Conquest is about seeking riches. In the main, the Spanish were after gold and precious metals, but then established plantations for sugar, indigo, and other things. The French engaged in the fur trade for the same purpose. The English, by and large, cultivated tobacco as their main commodity, but had other commodities (sugar, etc.) in the Carribean.
• There is a religious, missionary component. The Spanish and French were especially fervent in this regard, but religion was a strong part of the justification for colonization and conquest by all of the European powers. The Temple of Luz the Purifier has played a large part in financing and establishing this colony. They aim to preserve their influence here. Religion at the ground level also is burdened with the common people's folk superstitions and prejudices. Witches and wizards beware.
• Relations with the native peoples are always a factor, and very complicated. In the real history, diseases brought by European powers to the Americas wiped out about 90% of the native indigenous populations. The idea that these areas consisted of howling wilderness was not true, at least until disease took its toll. In some cases, particularly with the French in the north, the colonists needed the indigenous peoples just as much as those peoples wanted the guns and tools provided by the colonial powers. There was some degree of mutual cooperation. However, they also played different groups of indigenous people off against each other; this dynamic sometimes was employed by the native peoples as well. The Spanish model was very different. Their nobility sought to get rich, establish repute, and aggrandize itself through conquest (and the acquisition of precious metals). They were often brutal and ruthless. Later, their missionaries moderated (to a limited extent) these practices, but not often and not enough. By that time, diseases had taken their toll. The English were, in a word, arrogant. They expected the natives to roll over for them, and the fact that they didn't was proof that conquest was necessary.
• The lower classes had opportunities in the New World they didn't have in Europe. An English indentured servant, for example, could hope to receive an acreage in the colonies, to become a landowner. Land ownership policies in England (esp. "enclosure") had been eating away at this prerogative for many years. This was also reflected in the military, especially the navy.
• Piracy became an issue (as is the use of privateers). The on-again/off-again wars between these powers provided a surplus of able-bodied seamen, and they gained experience with taking and plundering ships. When the wars were over, many employed those very particular skillsets for other purposes (i.e., piracy). The colonial powers all spent time stealing from each other, just as they stole from the New World's native peoples.
• There's a level of lawlessness due to the tenuous control of the center over the periphery (though this varies over time, and due to circumstances). The competence, honesty, and loyalty of colonial governors, viceroys, etc., was not always assured, and this made life in the colonies somewhat chaotic in terms of how government got conducted. Further, there often were differences between "official" policies, especially toward other governments' colonies and the native peoples, and what those on the scene actually did. Later, this would result in rebellion over local control, taxation, etc.
• The interests of the Church, the nobility, the Crown, the merchant classes and the commoners often run at odds with each other. This creates a great deal of internal tension. While the colonial Governor is, ostensibly in charge, power must be shared in order for the colony to thrive. How that sharing occurs is a matter of constant dispute, with the potential for violent disagreement simmering below a polite and respectful surface.

These are just a few of the Western European elements that I find useful as context for Magayru. Rome also provides great fodder.

My model of the native peoples of Magyaru springs more from Pictish/Gaelic roots than from the indigenous American peoples. In part this is because I'm fascinated by the Roman experience in Britain, as well as the interactions between the Vikings and the Britons. I'm also interested in "flipping" the usual visual imagery of colonialism. The "savage" native peoples in this setting are pale-skinned ("They look like demons!"), and the Imperials are more like Mediterranean Romans and Ottoman Turks. In my mind, Ur-Hadad of the Metal Gods universe is more closely associated with Turkey and Eastern Europe than with Tolkien's more Western/Northern European aesthetic. Mostly, this is cosmetic, I'll admit. However, I think it proves more jarring to may players who associate colonialism with an American model rather than a Roman model. I think the combination of the two is interesting and useful in fantasy/colonial role-play. Also, the "colonists" are from warm and sunny climes, and Magyaru is a cold, dark, and gloomy land, mountainous and covered in great forests, crisscrossed by rivers, and filled with ancient standing stones, barrows, and ruins. It is a far grimmer place.

Finally, there is my weird idea of Turkey/Hungary. To be clear, it is in this area that a diverge from history the most. I like the idea of a powerful ruler, a cultured and educated, cosmopolitan empire. A certain level of decadence combined with a sense of cultural superiority. In this sense, my Empire owe as much to Robert Howard's Hyperboria as it does to whatever historical sources I might be reading. It also owes much to Adam Muszkiewicz and my interpretations of Ur-Hadad as an idea (perhaps more than a place). Also, in the background, there is the history of the World that Went Before, which includes all manner of fantasy races and tropes, sorcery, and so forth. So, it's not Turkey and it's not Eastern Europe, but it does filtch heavily from aesthetic and other elements that might be found there.

Add on top of these things, and the Howardian influence, the presence of Poe, Hawthorne, and Lovecraft, and you get a sense of where I'm trying to take this. I'm really enjoying playing in this sandbox, and seeing how the players interact with it and add to it. I think of this as an open world, and do my best to make sure the people who play in it are able to influence it.

Also, for our Zappadan offering, I offer this 1973 concert in Stockholm. Dig the grooviness of 1970s Sweden. Glorious!

Lacuna Locurae

I've been pondering what I should run for my face-to-face group, after they completed Sailors on a Starless Sea, and I think I've finally come up with something.

After escaping from the Starless Sea, the longship emerges, eventually, from a crack in a cliff, into a river. I'm thinking I might try the whole OMG WATERFALL! thing right off the bat, just to set the tone. We'll see. The more interesting thing is that this campaign will be in a realm outside of the "normal" DCC world.

What the party discovers is that they are at the base of some very high cliffs, above which are mountains surpassing even the Andes and Himilayas. Below them, foothills stretch toward a large coastal city, ocean and distant islands to the horizon.

The city itself is a colony of a distant kingdom, and a crossroads for trade. Tech levels are early colonial--ships capable of intercontinental travel, muskets, maybe the rudiments of heavy industry, etc. The city fathers are wealthy merchants, and the colonial governor is an ineffectual figurehead. There is a small colonial garrison in place to keep the peace; its leadership is competent and just, but their numbers are too few to do the job. The colony is becoming less and less like its original kingdom, and slipping slowly but inexorably toward independent-mindedness.

Culture is somewhat... unenlightened. Abject poverty exists alongside almost unimaginable wealth, and indentured servitude is common (outright slavery extremely rare, but not unknown). The city a rough and tumble place, and parts of it are entirely uncivilized. Witchcraft is a capital crime, and witch-hunters are respected figures, among most of the population, and especially among religious adherents. Executions are a popular form of entertainment for many in the lower classes, there not being much else to occupy them but drinking, fighting, and fucking. The demographics are entirely human (well, almost entirely so, but I can't go into that yet), but there's a pretty large degree of diversity among the human population, what with all the ships from far-off lands making portfall in this place.

I'm calling the campaign Lacuna Locura (Catchy, huh? I hope nobody did this already. Mr. Google says it hasn't been done, but...).

What is it? Let's start with some definitions.

Lacuna:  a gap or blank space in something; a missing part.

Locura:  insanity, madness; crazy thing, folly

There's an oddness that underlies the setting, things that aren't discussed, things that make people very, very uncomfortable. Those mountains above the city? Nobody goes there. In fact, nobody even talks about them. If the party tries to claim they are from there, people won't believe them. Nobody is from there. There's nothing beyond them. This is a Known Thing. Nobody here thinks differently. It's as if some part of reality has been removed from their minds. This is the lacuna, the missing knowledge. My thought is that a veil of magic separates the realms and keeps the population ignorant of this separation, and the very existence of a place "outside." Attempts to make claims to the contrary, or to demonstrate that the possibility, is provocative in the extreme, and could bring violence (even official notice) down on the party. The party, in contrast, knowing what they know, would be perceived by the citizenry as completely mad, by the city's officials and religious leaders as potentially subversive and dangerous, and by certain unnamed others as a dire threat. This is the locura, the psychosis afflicting this place.

I've yet to come up with a name for this city, but don't want to force it. It'll come eventually

The ruleset I'll be using is DCC RPG, the firearms rules from +Dak Ultimak's Crawl! (the original DCC RPG fanzine), possibly some elements of Transylvanian Adventures by +Scott Mathis, some bits of Lamentations of the Flame Princess style weirdness, and probably some other stuff that I'll make up along the way (mostly to do with the reasons behind this madness of missing memories). This is intended to be city-based adventure, but I could certainly see plenty of opportunities for adventures on the high sea, investigation of the mysteries of the mountains, etc., depending on where the players want to take it.

I think this should be fun, and a departure from the kinds of games I normally run and play in. Maybe it will end up being a good setting, as well. The Metal Gods campaign has set a pretty high bar in that regard, so my expectations for this will be high as well.

UPDATE

Thanks to +Adam Muszkiewicz for helping me with my Latin. Locura Locurae is the correct genetive form.