Robin D. Laws's Blog, page 108
June 22, 2011
Korad: Pitching Ulthon
In its wisdom, the collective has decided that we know enough about the Aesigil and their land of Threniri to move onto our next province. I would, in like spirit, submit that, as the Aesigil are the most important force in Threniri, that we don't need to spend much effort detailing the separate qualities of the region's minority human population. A story set in Threniri will likely be about the Aesigil, just as you'd expect a book on a Klingon homeworld to be all about the Klingons.
With that in mind, let's moot ideas for Ulthon, one of the empire's most populous provinces, and one dominated by the carrion-eating Veytikka period. While ideas about the Ulthon human minority might well win favor at voting time, experience suggests that Veytikka pitches will rule the roost here.
Here's what we've already established about the physical environment:
The Interior: Bonelands and Wronglands
Between the central rivers, ancient bleached bones of giant creatures are everywhere. No two creatures are alike, and most died seemingly in battle with each other. Some of these skeletons are big enough to build villages in/around, others serve as bridges.
Interspersed with the farmlands, and often the site of the hamlets and villages (constructed from or on the bones) there are sharp, knifelike mountains, diminishing in size as one approaches the great bay, and increasing to nigh-impassable sky-raking masses as one approaches the sources of the greater rivers.
One of the reasons the wronglands are difficult to traverse is the variability of the mountainous shards within.
The mountains are not visible from the outside, but once you set out to travel through one of the wronglands they loom up out of the distance.
Irrigated farmland is common, with lots of tiny hamlets and villages.
There are areas that are completely uninhabited. There is nothing wrong with the land - it is as fertile as the next patch of land, but it is just somehow ineffably wrong. People avoid going there, avert their gaze when travelling by, and don't like to talk about it. Children may share the legends of the wronglands, but adults never do. The 'wrong' land can be as large as an hour to travel across or as small as an acre. Strangely, 'wrong' land tends to be bigger on the inside (thus faster to go around than to cross) and occasionally has weather slightly in delay of weather around it's borders.
A line of arid, broken hills divides the headwaters of the three southern rivers from the desert to the south.
As rivers form the backbone of trade in Korad, there is an extensive north-south canal system connecting the major rivers.
And this is what we know about the largest cities. Their general weirdness suggests that the mainline Ulthon/Veytikka culture may be primarily manifest in many smaller settlements.
Galeharrow
Wind blows constantly here, driving mills, and maddening some of the populace. Galeharrow houses a secretive religious cult, infamous for its expertly trained spies and assassins. Its river flows backwards, from the sea a into a pothole in the limestone mountains to the southwest.
Godfen
An infamous swamp casts a dread influence over Godfen. Its infamous poisoners hoard knowledge of the venoms they harvest from the swamp. It contains a dangerous half-sunken ruined city, rumored to have hidden treasures. In the heart of the ruins dwells Bloodfen's great lizard, who is fed sacrifices daily.
Tollford
This city sits on the only river crossing within 100 miles. A fee is charged to cross the river. It is home to a sizable minority of an otherwise unknown culture, who are mistreated if they go anywhere else. It is built into the side of a giant vertebra, part of the great and strange Bonelands formation.
As always: keep your idea brief, so I can fit it into next week's poll—12 words or less. And that's an actual 12, folks, not a notional 12. One idea per commenter. Pitch standalone ideas rather than building on someone else's proposal. Get them in before early Monday evening (eastern time.)
June 21, 2011
Setting Modularity and Ashen Stars
A hurdle any SF RPG faces is the lack of default setting assumptions. From the earliest days of D&D, we have been accustomed to a portmanteau fantasy world. This hybrid creature sprang from the experimental vats of the wizards Gygax and Arneson, combining the Howard sword and sorcery and Tolkien epic literary fantasy modes into a new fusion. For gaming purposes, it seemed perfectly natural that it would then go on to blend in tropes from mythology and the works of later writers in both of the big two fantasy traditions. The resulting fairy tale medievalism combo platter would then go on, through gaming-inspired fiction, to feed back into prose fantasy. While some fantasy games set themselves in very distinct worlds like Glorantha or Harn, a variation on this blenderized world remains one's starting assumption when you hear of a new fantasy game.
Because it encompasses so many sub-genres and formats, and because audiences valued authors who built their own unique speculative futures, the blenderizing trick never quite worked on SF. Even in movie and TV space opera, the vibes of Star Trek and Star Wars are sufficiently different that a satisfying mash-up seems impossible.
So while a new SF RPG can (and ought to) key players into the setting's core assumptions by reference to familiar tropes, its setting will be more distinct than the default fantasy setting.
That leaves two choices before the game creator: to go generic, providing separable, modular rules chunks GMs can assemble into settings of their own choice, or to go specific, presenting a distinctive galaxy that best fits the overall objectives of the game design. Each option is desirable to a subset of buyers. But when it comes to the decision-making process that gets people to buy games, the specific beats the general. As much as they might want to scratch-built or customize their own settings, that impulse is an abstract and intellectual one. It does not answer the key question fueling any RPG: what do we do? A distinctive setting appeals to the emotions, with narrative hooks and visual imagery. In short, it fires the imagination. Even if a game can be presented in generic fashion, a specific iteration that shows how to use it will grab more attention than a toolkit.
(After your rules gain traction through a vivid setting, you might then be able to repackage them in a successful toolkit format. That's the product history of Hero Wars / HeroQuest in a nutshell.)
The specific design goal of Ashen Stars is to take the investigative play model of the GUMSHOE system and apply it to the space opera genre. Thus it also makes sense to build the setting around the needs of the roleplaying experience in general, and of investigative play flow in particular.
Watch this space for further elaboration...
June 20, 2011
June 17, 2011
Getting Tense
While guest-posting over on Dave Gross' blog, I talk about the decision to write The Worldwound Gambit in the present tense, and install the inaugural members of my prose stylist hall of fame. I forget to namecheck Charles Portis, but I didn't say it was a complete list, did I?
June 16, 2011
Ironroot Deception III
In the third installment of "The Ironroot Deception", featuring characters from The Worldwound Gambit, Gad wins a brutal victory against a fellow prisoner, which leads to a strange offer from his chief captor.
That captor, the imperious elven supremacist Dualal, is the subject of this week's fine illustration by J. P. Targete.
Go forth and experience the penultimateness.
June 15, 2011
Shortlist For 2011 Diana Jones Award Announced
Three RPGs and two board-games vie
for hobby-gaming's most exclusive trophy
The committee of the Diana Jones Award has announced the shortlist for its 2011 award. Boiled down from a longlist of 22 nominees, this year the list contains five candidates that in the opinion of the committee exemplify the very best that hobby-gaming has produced in the last twelve months. In alphabetical order, they are:
Catacombs, a board-game by Ryan Amos, Marc Kelsey and Aron West, published by Sands of Time Games
The Dresden Files RPG by the Dresden Files RPG Team, published by Evil Hat Productions
Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, a board-game by Mario Porpora, Pietro Righi Riva, Luca Francesco Rossi and Nicolò Tedeschi, published by Cranio Creations
Fiasco, an RPG by Jason Morningstar, published by Bully Pulpit Games
Freemarket, an RPG by Luke Crane and Jared A. Sorensen, published by Sorencrane MRCZ The winner of the 2011 Award will be announced on Wednesday 3rd August, at the annual Diana Jones Award and Freelancer Party in Indianapolis, the unofficial start of the Gen Con Indy convention.
ABOUT THE AWARD
The Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming was founded and first awarded in 2001. It is presented annually to the person, product, company, event or any other thing that has, in the opinion of its mostly anonymous committee of games industry luminaries, best demonstrated the quality of 'excellence' in the world of hobby-gaming in the previous year. The winner of the Award receives the Diana Jones trophy.
The short-list and eventual winner are chosen by the Diana Jones Committee, a mostly anonymous group of games-industry alumni and illuminati, known to include designers, publishers, cartoonists, and those content to rest on their laurels.
Past winners include industry figures such as Peter Adkison and Jordan Weisman, the role-playing games Nobilis, Sorcerer, and My Life with Master, the board-games Dominion and Ticket to Ride, and the website BoardGameGeek. This is the eleventh year of the Award.
More information is available at www.dianajonesaward.org or at the Award's Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Jones_Award
CONTACT
For more information you can contact a representative of the DJA committee directly: committee@dianajonesaward.org
Ripped From the Headlines: Fake Corpse Call
When a phone tip from a woman claiming to be a psychic leads police in a rural community to excavate a supposed mass grave, the Ordo Veritatis dispatches a team to the site to cope with supernatural repercussions. By the time they arrive at the scene, the call is shown to be a hoax. But as seasoned investigators into the machinations of the Esoterrorists, the team knows better than to pack up and go home. The emotional impact of this nationally televised event has likely weakened the membrane between this world and the Outer Dark. If there isn't already an Esoterror sleeper cell nearby, they can bet that at least one will be headed to town, stirring up further cognitive dissonance until genuinely uncanny events start to occur. Can the team shut them down before they do permanent damage to the membrane?
The Esoterror Factbook details a Station Duty campaign frame, in which agents are permanently assigned to one locale where a thinning membrane provokes a series of horrific occurrences. We'll be exploring this idea in more depth in an upcoming product. In the meantime, the fake corpse call could serve as the instigating incident for your Station Duty series.
June 13, 2011
Korad: What We Know About the Body Snatchers
Vote results for the poll defining the region of Threniri and its majority group, the Aesigils, are in. As you'll recall, the Aesigil are living runes who form symbiotic bonds with human hosts.
Aesigils trace descent from star-patterns and kinship is based on celestial proximity. They and their hosts form 4-or-more-way pansexual marriages. Despite the intimacy of this bond, Aesigils display no comprehension of, or care for, human age or gender. Perhaps this is one meaning of the popular saying, "The pattern is more important than the ink." In fact, some aesigil sceptics don't believe humans are truly sentient without their aid.
Their enemies refer to them as "body snatchers."
Imbuing runes with intelligence to impersonate Aesigils is a capital crime. Giant aesigils dwell in and are carved into the Wyrdward mountains.
Wyrdwardans believe that great magic is born of sentences of exactly thirteen words.
Does this tell us all we need to know about the Aesigil for now? Or does the collective feel that we should take a few more weeks to nail down more details?
Vote in this poll to decide whether to dig deeper or move forward.
View Poll: #1751833
