As Fables of Camelot (working title, that) was created for convention use, it has already had quite a bit of playtesting from Sami and some other folks who have the time to run an introductory booth at conventions. The overall reports are promising: the game has sufficient depth to engage anybody, but a single cycle of play can be run through in 15 minutes, so the individual victims can choose how long they’ll play. The game handles any numbers of players from 2 + GM up, too.

Sami wrote a Finnish draft of the game text during the convention season, so I have something else aside from memory to base this English-language draft on; this is basically the same game, I just rewrite the text instead of just translating Sami. So far we don’t really have any concrete plans for what to do with the game in the long run – we both like what we made and this has obvious publishing potential, but it’ll have to wait until one of us has the time to run with it. I’m mostly putting this English version up for reference purposes and because Christoph Boeckle asked to see the game’s text after we described the game to him at Spiel last month.

I put the actual game text on a separate page in case it needs any updating after publication; although this is not in active development as such, I’ll be happy to fix and improve any obvious stuff as we mull over what to do with the game. Do ask if there are any vague parts that need more explanation.

Random Tables

Comparing to Sami’s Finnish text, I switched the random tables to use 2d6 instead of d8, d20 etc. that Sami used. I consider this mostly an aesthetic detail, although obviously the bell curve has its implications – I would frankly prefer the more random flat curve that you get by using specialty dice like Sami does, but as the game otherwise runs entirely off the d6 I found this a suitable compromise for now. Details, essentially, as the random tables here are not that crucial affairs; easy to build new ones.

Problem of Virtue

First read the game text to understand this bit, it’s a rule that we’ve been debating with Sami.

The player characters in the game are defined by their Might and Fame, two abilities that have somewhat lateral influences on a character’s identity and effectiveness. They also fluctuate and are used somewhat differently from each other.

What I’ve been thinking is that I should try adding a third ability, Virtue. This would be a sort of magical and social ability that would give the characters a bit more dimension; I especially like the idea that I could differentiate between say Lancelot and Mordred in a striking way by having a third ability score. Sami disagrees; he quite rightly points out that the game runs quite fine without this added complication.

Were I to use Virtue, it would be rolled for each character on a d6 in character creation to get a random angle on the character’s willpower and attitudes; should work as grist for the characterization mill that’s so important to getting the game to go quickly.

Virtue would be improved by Christian discipline; I really like the idea that while a pagan might have a high virtue score out of chargen by chance, improving the score is only really possible by Grace; fits well in the literary parameters of the genre. Perhaps the single most Christian knight per adventure gets a point of virtue or something like that.

The actual use of Virtue is the most divisive: I would basically use it as a Pendragon-like virtue check, to find out whether a character does foolish things when tempted. To me this is a solid feature of the genre – knights in Mallory are constantly doing idiotic things just because a vision of black magic seduces them. It’s basically a theoretical disagreement in many ways: Sami thinks that taking away the player’s chance to choose whether his character goes hunting for the Morgan Le Fay’s fleshpot illusions is deprotagonizing, while I think that the interesting choices lie in what the character chooses to do after his failure of virtue; essentially we disagree on the proper model of advocation in a narrativist roleplaying game, as Sami thinks that a player’s task is to represent both a character’s ego and subconscious, while I think that he should be limited to the ego; it shouldn’t be up to the player to decide whether overwhelming temporary passion makes the character do foolish things.

Adding Virtue would give an easy way of engaging characters in adventures, as the GM could call for Virtue checks to see who falls in love with whom and all that sort of thing, thus giving the players obvious inns through which to relate to situations. The disadvantage is a bit of added complexity in a game that is already performing quite well without this; I don’t even know if I should try to develop this game into the perfect Arthurian game when it can be merely the perfect introductory rpg.

I recently got a new computer – a rare event for me, as despite my tech support duties I rarely get new equipment for myself. As a matter of curiousity I took another stab at a considerably recent game with the new machine, and have thus been playing Witcher now for about four days, all told. Let’s talk about where computer RPGs are going, here.

Witcher is an adventure game (computer RPG, that is – an adventure game with character development and competitive combat elements) based on a Polish fantasy novel series, made by a Polish game development house. It’s from a couple of years back, practically recent by my measure. I have no idea how it ranks in terms of writing, production and design against recent western competition – the freshest CRPGs I’ve played have been awful Japanese console games, which is only nominally the same genre.

The topic of the game is this enchanting fantasy archetype the author paints about “witchers”, sort of reverse paladins in a more or less typical post-Tolkienist fantasy world. I enjoy the character concept here a lot – witchers are humans who go through a dangerous alchemical mutation to become cool monster-killing machines; their mutated physiology allows them to get inhuman powers by consuming all sorts of alchemical concoctions. While witchers are feared by the common folk, they have their own code of honor, although not one that matches well to the chivalric notions of the upper classes of society. Well-written modern fantasy literature as the basis of the game, in other words – I don’t remember offhand seeing the idea of an arcane warrior being done in as lifelike manner, as something more than just a wizard who wields a sword. The actual plot centers on one of these witchers as he tracks some bad guys who stole the witcher-creation process in an effort to create their own outside the control of the witcher brotherhood.

At this writing I’ve played the game about 80% through, I’d say – end of the fourth chapter out of five if I’m any judge. I’ve been playing in 6-10 hour periods over a couple of weeks, perhaps 4-5 days so far. Basically a chapter at a time.

My overall experience with Witcher has been intensely positive: its writing is miles ahead of those Japanese games I’ve played now and then through the decade, so far so that it is comparable with actual literature – a feat that used to be possible only for the most visionary games, usually made in a very minimalistic manner so as to not let the writer mess up the overall aesthetic. The writing doesn’t happily come in the way of the actual game, which is largely about the combat subgame – a real-time affair combining some coordination skills, tactical decision-making and a bit of resource-management.

I remember that this game got some "controversial" press for its explicit elements. Nothing to complain there, the material is coordinated and in harmony with the style and subject of the game.

Overall the game has managed to make me nostalgic for PC gaming – this game is created by my sort of gamers, I well might have ended up making similar ones had I not abandoned the digital platform. I’ve even learned a thing or two about what’s possible in a real-time player controlled combat game in terms of character development.

That combat system really works

I needed to give this its own caption to emphasize it sufficiently. I really like Witcher’s combat system, which is strange considering how I usually am pretty derisive about real-time combat in character development games. Here, though, the character development options are interesting and impact the combat system heavily, and more importantly, the combat itself is quick and tense, especially earlier in the game. It’s not usual in my experience for a CRPG to offer the same sort of rush you get off a tensely built shooter game, but here life and death are often a matter of hardcore performance in tactics and technique, which pleases me. CRPGs traditionally suffer for bland and slow combats, but here a fight can end in 10 seconds – and not always with the death of the enemy.

The problem of CRPG

Although my general experience with the game has been very positive, I doubt that I’m going to become a sudden CRPG convert and quit my tabletop group altogether. While I and Witcher flowed well together for the first 10 hours of game-time or so, at the current stage the flaws of the underlying game model start showing through: I like the combats and I enjoy the writing reasonably well (it’s baseline genre fantasy – nothing to actively recommend, but perfectly passable as a read if you enjoy fantasy literature, and easily better than most of what you get in gaming), but the logistical crunch involved in progressing in the game starts to get exhausting, and it gets more so once I progress in the game and get used to its particular tricks of pacing and plotting.

Logistical crunch? The reader doesn’t necessarily know what I mean, so better explain. A sandbox CRPG is a game without set order of progress, the player can do different things in a freely chosen order. (Witcher is a sandbox, essentially each of the five chapters presents a new playing field for the player to crawl over.) A typical way of doing the sandbox is to create the playing field and then introduce a bunch of “quests”, game-mechanically supported activities for the player to engage with.

The logistical crunch comes into the picture when the game is thoroughly scripted like Witcher while also involving logistical issues in quest completion: the thorough, experienced gamer will approach the sandbox as a project to be cleared systematically: first run over the area to find the available quests, then check all the nooks and crannies for hidden bonuses, then start priorizing the quest completions by time of day (Witcher has a day-night cycle), location and necessary combat. This latter introduces an extra wrinkle in Witcher, as it takes some resources (drugs, basically) to buff the witcher into the semigod of monster-slaying he is, and the buffing lasts long enough to be useful in several battles if you know where you’re going next.

The outcome of the above sort of game structure is that the game is not actually just about following the plot and fighting some tense, exciting combats – the majority of the game performance equation is actually about running from point A to point B (by the way of C and D so you don’t need to go to those separately later), collecting quest items and using your memory and search routines developed through years of computer gaming to manage a full coverage of the sandbox in an efficient time-frame and in such a way that you yourself actually know that you’ve covered everything, so as to enable you to move on without missing anything interesting or important.

I won’t claim that this is somehow a bad core content for games, and I’ve entertained myself successfully off it for several days now, but this logistical crunch is actually the part that makes me slowly tire of Witcher despite its considerable virtues. The last chapter I played, the fourth one, actually felt like one huge hamster wheel in how much time I ended up spending running around after quest items. I don’t think that this is because, or solely because, the individual chapter’s scripting compared to the earlier game – more likely is that I’ve just grown used to the game’s tricks, so there’s not as much uncertainty and surprise in what the game does; I just run around, trigger NPCs, collect some herbs to keep the drug factory running and overrun even the intended atmospheric set-piece encounters almost without noticing because I’m so deeply engaged by the issue of what I’m supposed to be doing next. I start playing and suddenly notice that I’m actually skipping dialogue because I don’t need to read it to trigger the mechanical hooks – I even grow bored with the combat system due to the over-exposure of the random monsters that get in the way – I’m basically rushing towards the end.

Reason

This is probably not that profound, but I suspect that the reason for why the logistical crunch starts weighting on me is not in the nature of the logistical crunch itself, but rather in that thing I said at the end there – I’m rushing towards the end of the chapter, or even the entire game, and that’s why a mechanical structure that’s intended to pace things and offer a vehicle for narration starts seeming like the enemy instead of a friend. While a certain amount of logistical efficiency is probably normal in playing a game like this (“I might as well take care of this other thing while I’m in this part of town”), when it overrides enjoying the atmosphere and following the plot and even fighting the fights as a concern (“I need to get this fight done with so I can get to the next one without my buffs lapsing”), that’s probably not the intended experience.

When I’d played the first episode of the game I actually told a friend that if the game had ended there, I’d have given it extremely high marks; everything so far had been nigh perfect (even the writing of the first episode is of higher caliber than the later ones), and even the plot was fundamentally done. A 10-hour game would have been quite suitable for my preferences, but instead the game is 50 hours long, and what could have been a perfect experience turns into something that I’m not quite sure I’ll even finish; I could be playing Witcher right now, but instead I’m writing this blog post. I have no better explanation for this than to talk of how boring and empty of meaning that logistical crunch feels, especially as I know that I have another new chapter ahead of me after I finish the fourth, which means a whole new cast of NPCs to interrogate and another dozen stupid “fetch me an item” quests. Could be that this is just because the inventory is so small (a considerable additional source of running from point A to B later on), but I suspect that it’s because I somehow want the game to already be over.

It’s an interesting question of production logic whether games like this could be made shorter; I suspect that the model of production a top-level game studio engages in becomes inefficient with games that use less content than the norm; most of the work in making the game comes in the form of engine, graphics and game design, which all scale easily for a longer game – so why not make a 50-hour game instead of a 10-hour one when it’s not that much more expensive?

It’s also interesting to ponder whether I could somehow reboot my experience of the game so as to enjoy it freshly while it’s still unfinished. The logical way would be to take a month’s break, but then I’d have forgotten what was going on in the game, and it would be difficult to get back into it. Tricky. I suspect that the game would be better if there were no mechanical venues of influence in between the different episodes so that they could be genuinely separate game experiences; an anthology of stories instead of a boringly long yarn, if you will. This would lighten the logistical load and keep the whole phenomenon of hurrying towards the end of the game under control – you could approach each new episode as a stand-alone story, and not feel obligated to push through just to get to the end of the whole game.

Some Premise

The premise of the “What My Father Taught Me” campaign is that the player characters are bog-standard heortling youths of a Sartarite clan readying for their initiation and living the life of the clan, all the while seeking for their place in the world. The campaign begins on the brink of the initiations and follows the lives of the characters until they’ve figured out who is their chosen god – and consequently and interchangeably, what is their place in society. Heortling initiation procedure takes a couple of years to go through and involves not only a heroquest or two, but also all sorts of other stuff, especially when the presumption is that the player characters are far from the everyday members of their society.

I basically only need to have rules for playing teenaged Orlanthi, but in practice I’m a systematician, so I’d rather have an understanding of how to latch the specific campaign focus onto further developments as necessary. For example, players have lots of control in this game, and it’s technically possible that we breeze through all this initiatory stuff in the next session and go on to follow the adventures of adult Orlanthi warriors travelling deep into the Lunar empire for some esoteric purpose; I’d rather not rework the game mechanically just because we need to introduce new elements of the setting to stay true to the direction of the story.

As regards the wider cosmological viewpoint on Glorantha, I’ve written a bit about how to present the setting in Solar System before, and I’m still reasonably happy with the basic ideas there. Still haven’t read the new Sartar book, which associates tell me is a very true-to-Glorantha and elegant treatise on how to represent the setting in the Heroquest rules; should probably get that into my paws before long to progress further in this.

Pool Rundown

As described in that earlier thread, player characters basically have five Pools in this SS crunch landscape, three of which are magical aspects of the character’s nature. Like so:

Experience is basically a Pool that represents a character’s immanent nature, his skills and abilities in the inner world, as a natural being of mixed nature that people are in Glorantha. (The name of the Pool is ass, we’re constantly getting confused about whether we’re talking about experience points in the rules system or Experience Pool points.) The passive Ability associated with Experience is Guts (E), representing a character’s will and stamina.

Community is sort of an external Pool, the opposite of Experience; a character can have Abilities such as his Reputation (specify), Wealth, and various relationships both to individuals and communities under this heading. I’m a bit uncertain about whether there even is a Passive Ability under this Pool (this would be unusual in SS, but not necessarily problematic), but so far we’ve assumed that the Passive Ability here is called Social (C), representing a character’s outwards identity and capability of understanding and perceiving social matters.

I should note here that this is actually a rather weird Pool set-up for Solar System, usually the Pools are much closer to traditional RPG abilities. I can’t say yet as to whether it would be better to go back to something more conventional, but at least this is an interesting experiment. The magical Pools push the envelope even more, being as how they represents aspects of a character’s being in a way that Glorantha roleplaying games usually shy away from:

Soul is the main magical Pool for the Orlanthi, who are theists by nature. Theism is the magical worldview that reifies “gods”, anthropomorphised cosmic principles that are basically made of soul stuff and interact with the Soul part of a mortal worshipper. Gods are present in the world immanently (as opposed to localized as a being) or as distant but supernaturally observant things. Soul magic is about controlling the power of the gods by perceiving the world in the terms of the individual god’s mythology, emulating the god and perceiving his actions in the world. Typical forms of soul magic are sacrificing to encourage the god to perform his cosmic function, and internalizing a god’s superpowers by becoming more alike to the god and thus duplicating his nature and capabilities yourself. The Soul Pool is refreshed by engaging in sacrificial worship which is the proper form of addressing gods.

Spirit is a distinctly secondary Pool for the Orlanthi, but their culture acknowledges the place and legitimacy of the spirits as something external to the community at least, if not something that resides within the individual himself. There are even facets to the society where spirit worship is primary instead of theism, albeit this by definition is a specialty function and not a basis for any Orlanthi community. Be that as it may, spiritual magic is about dealing with “spirits”, insubstantial but temporally present supernatural beings that reside in the nature of the world; for a spiritualist the supernatural is not somewhere far away to be contacted, but rather immediately present as long as you have the eyes to see. Typically spirit magic is about associating with individual spirits and convincing them to see to your needs, but it’s also possible for the spirit magician to become a spirit himself via shamanist practice to get things done more direct-like. Spirit Pool is refreshed by engaging in extatic worship that allows the spiritist to perceive the spirit world properly via an abnormal state of perception.

Essence is a somewhat demonic thing from Orlanthi viewpoint, but even they have this facet to their being just like they have a soul and a spirit. The Essence of a human is basically like a Platonic Ideal, a form that is instantiated by the material world, possessed by every thing that is materially bound and qualifiable; essential magic is about understanding the basic nature of various essences and manipulating the rules of their interaction. Typical essential magic concerns esoteric knowledge that essences of various things answers to, although the practice also involves enhancing the magic by manipulating external sources of energy, such as tapping different planes of existence or the essential energy of human worshippers. Essence Pool is refreshed by the practice of veneration, meaning the intent observation of the essentially unified transcendental nature of reality, also known as God.

Those three Pools share a Passive Ability called God/Spirit/Essence Sight which basically just represents a characters perspiracy in perceiving and understanding the supernatural realm as it unfolds before his eyes.

Common Abilities for the Orlanthi

I made a list of typical Abilities for our campaign. I tried to keep it compact just to prevent a descent into madness in a world where the Orlanthi are really just a small slice of the full picture. These all associate with the Experience Pool, as do all proper skills and such.

Farming is used for everyday farming work.
Animal handling is used to take care of the animals.
Poetry is used for fancy speaking.
Feasting is for showing hospitality and drinking boisterously.
Magical rites is for understanding general magical practice; it’s not supposed to actually do anything magical by itself, but it helps in setting up rites and such.

Then there are of course some Abilities that are mostly practiced by men:

Skirmishing is useful for spear-throwing and such soft warfare, including raiding.
Melee is for decisive martial encounters, close range and full of murderous intent.
Sporting is how men show how manly they are to other men and women.
Hunting is for wilderness survival in general, as well as stalking, setting traps and so on.

And of course, women:

Housework is a catch-all for running a successful stead, including everything from cooking to child rearing.
Handcrafts is not just for women, but they have to know how to weave and make the household implements.
Female viles is used by women in matters of procreation and handling men.

Finally, there is a wide bunch of abilities that are mostly of cultic consern – you can have these even if not a member of these cults, occasionally, but most people don’t need to.

Tallying is for math and accounting.
Literacy is for reading and writing.
Healing is for serious medicine.
Smithing is for making tools and such by these arcane arts.
Music also covers other artistic performances.
Law is for ruling and legal cases.
Lovemaking is for courting and making partners happy.
Trading is for making deals.
Rookery is for stealing and such dishonest work.

It’s supposed to be a pretty simple list, so if I get any inspiration, I might even prune it further. One could go in the opposite direction easily enough, too, but much of that important cultural color can come out via the Ability specialization rules and other such nuances – you can present your spear-specialized fighter easily enough as a character who has a skirmishing specialty knack for that sort of thing, no need for a separate Ability.

I could also go into the Secrets and Keys here, but this post is getting a bit long in the tooth, so I’ll wrap it up for now. Later for the rest, the campaign doesn’t seem to be going away in the foreseeable future.

Life on the Tula

Most of our session was about establishing the everyday facts of life – what it means to be a member of the Enferoli clan, Bachad tribe in Far Place in year 1612 after time began. I’d printed out a bunch of basic references to compensate for my go-to Glorantha books being on loan in Helsinki; I really should get that new Sartar book, it’d be a perfect source for this, I imagine that it lists all the major gods and their rules, nomenclature info, calendars and such, the sort of thing you need for fodder in this sort of thing.

We began the session with the inwards spiraling technique that is typical of heavy setting play for me: first we discussed the general political and religious situation of the Far Place (Harvar Ironfist, Yelmalite confusion, history of Alone and Alda-Chur), then segued into tribal history and geography, tribal neighbours and so on. As we got into the clan issues, it was established that the Enferoli clan lives on half a dozen largish steads (by Sartarite measure – over a hundred people per stead), of which one was such that all three player character youths lived therein. We even established that the stead was home for four or five different bloodlines.

(I understand that the Sartarite basic practice is that a bloodline lives independently on its own stead, sort of like old Finnish farming community was set up historically. However, in the Far Place life is sufficiently dangerous that it makes sense for the community to be more close-knit – the stead will often feature some walls and earthworks and such. In the case of the Enferoli clan, though, most of the steads are merely repurposed summer transhumance cottages at this point in time; they’ve just retreated in numbers to the wilderness from their old lands in the Hidden Valley, encouraged by the grim rulership of Harvar Ironfist. Time will tell if the clan will keep to the multi-bloodline steads or spread out once they have time to build more estates.)

The actual in-character play began pretty elegantly as a matter of procedure, I think. I’m a very structural and methodological Story Guide in Solar System (a game that allows quite a bit of leeway in technique), so it might be considered peculiar that the first thing I did was not to establish a scene, but to call for an Ability check: I asked the players to make an Ability check to find out how their characters had performed over the winter seasons, so we’d be able to frame things well for the Sea Season, with which we were starting the game. Each player chose an Ability and told the others what sort of things their character had done in the stead over the last winter. As it happened, Sipi’s character Ingman actually managed to fail in his hunting deeds, getting lost on the trap trail, while Tero’s Olric messed up the count of utensils he was tasked to take with his Tallying Ability. These failures would come back to haunt the two, as we’ll see.

My framework for the spring season was that the clan would have scheduled clan initiation rites for later on in the season, so all the boys would be keen to present themselves well to get into the initiations. (Orlanthi initiations are a serious thing, you can die in them; a boy won’t necessarily be submitted for the initiation if his bloodline doesn’t consider him ready.) As Sipi’s character had embarrassed himself recently, he heard from his father that the elders had opted to keep him back for the next round of initiations in 3-4 years or whenever they’d get around to it again. Olric and Esa’s Errol were home-free in this regard, at least as long as they wouldn’t fuck up too badly over the first few weeks of the season.

(I’m somewhat bemused by the fact that I’m not quite sure when Orlanthi initiations are supposed to happen – might be that I’m playing it “wrong” by having the initiations begin on Harvast Barefoot’s sacred day in the Sea Season instead of the superficially more logical Sacred Time. Well, if this is outrageously wrong, the justification is that this particular clan has a somewhat different mythic history that causes the difference.)

After establishing this basic conceit of approaching initiations I just started throwing out some low-tension setting detail: there were some Harvast’s lackeys visiting the stead, a couple characters were sent sheepherding to the spring pastures, the stead started burning the prepared fields so as to get the seed into the ground, the boys got a chance to flirt with some shepherdesses, that sort of thing. This is not to say that important events did not happen: Ingman proved himself to his father by bravely confronting some rebellious Orlanthi he encountered while herding sheep near Gamla’s Leap, while Olric took a step too far in being a spoiled brat (and was suspected of stealing utensils from the stead, too) and got himself sent to Alone to live with his uncle – the family is hoping that this will teach Olric that stealing from the family and being an insufferable little piggy has consequences. As the score stands after the first session and first 1½ of the Sea Season, Ingman is back on the initiation roster while Olric is out – I have high hopes to mess up the situation further before Harvast’s day rolls around, it’d be just great if one of the character manages to miss the initiations altogether by being unworthy of meeting Orlanth.

Next session we should have some interesting stuff abound in the game:

• Ingman and Errol have been established as something of a partnership in youth – they hang out together and have some chemistry, with their Keys pinging off each other’s personalities pretty well. Their deeds in the last session will come to haunt them, as their rivalry with Omger, the son of the local Godi, develops, and as Ingman continues his uncharacteristically lecherous advances towards the prim Meri Nevalasdottir. Then there’s the “magic” sword Ingman got as a gift from the rebels – lots of stuff to play with.
• Olric is in hot waters as his Harst-worshipping grandfather wants him to man up and learn honor; the man’s eldest son stayed behind in Alone as most of the clan retreated to the wilderness steads, so we’ll get to see what sort of household he’s running – I’m envisioning something related to Harst the Good Reeve, or perhaps Issaries. Regardless, Olric has a good chance of not getting back into good graces of the family before the initiations, especially if he gets seduced by the urban pleasures of Alone. Will Olric become an Orlanthi proper at all, or would the Lunar ways be better for him? Will his uncle, clearly a less hardcore traditionalist, understand him any better?

I expect that we won’t get into the massive initiation processes in the next session yet, but we’ll probably get to the brink, ready for it in the third session. The Orlanthi initiation is Serious Business, with massive vistas of cosmology and theology opened up for the characters to experience first-hand, plenty of instruction in the proper ways of being an Orlanthi and finally, the choice of gods – a god chooses a person, or a person chooses a god. Easy to take an entire session or more in that if we want to.

The crew for the game was basically formed by me calling my old confidante Sipi – he’s the Domo of the campaign for now, making sure that everybody shows up, choosing the play sites and in general handling the game-external hassles. Aside from Sipi we have two players, Tero and Esa; Tero I specifically requested from Sipi due to how I’ve wanted to play with him for a long time now, while Esa came as an incidental bonus as so often happens in roleplaying. I’m rather excited about the quality of the crew, and the first session chemistry was fine as well.

We played in a new Iisalmi restaurant called “Olohuone” (“The Living Room”), and I have to say that I rather liked the place – on Saturday afternoon it was very quiet and suitable for a social gathering of this sort. Didn’t yet get around to sampling more than the drinks menu, but I’m sure that we’ll get there with a longer session soon enough.

Initially there was some talk about playing LotFP instead of Solar System, as it happened that I had my LotFP box with me as well as the SS stuff. Ultimately SS won the first round of deliberation, though, mostly because the crew wanted a game that would have lots of events per session; an old school D&D game can’t really ensure this due to the particular GMing technique, so although it’s not a particular problem for the game, we went with the dramatic option for now. This group could totally do OSR, too, so maybe we’ll go there in the spring after the SS thing winds down.

The Battle of Settings

This was actually the main part of the evening – Solar System is a generic rules set and we specifically had not chosen the campaign to play in advance, so we had to make the choice on the fly. Many alternatives were floated, with the understanding that I’d make the initial selection as the prospective Story Guide; as an outcome we got two main contenders for the actual game, both campaigns that I had been considering in the abstract through the last month:

DubaiPunk is basically my take on Cyberpunk 2020, one of the best roleplaying games of all time. The basic conceit is to emphasize the social issues of the original inspiration while  playing down the adventure/anarchy and cybernetic superpowers. The world of DubaiPunk is one where the hyperinflation of the western currencies has lifted the environs of the Indian Ocean into economic prominence in the world, its currency the Gold Dinar and its capital Dubai, the city/emirate that never sleeps. Flavourful and thematically powerful, we invented all sorts of stuff while talking about it: the role of islam in the world of the future, a feudal emirate as the nexus of world trade, Americans withdrawing from the Outer Space Treaty for unstated reasons, modern computer technology as a step-stone to cybernetic identity and so on. Good stuff.

What My Father Taught Me is, as the perceptive reader guesses, a Glorantha campaign. I’ve written about this before, but last week I realized that what my Glorantha-SS needs is the idea that the campaign would deliberately focus on the bog-standard Orlanthi experience from the viewpoint of adolescents going through the elaborate Orlanthi rites of passing; the point of the campaign would be to create some characters and follow the formative years of their lives, finding out which gods and which places in the world would prove to be theirs, if any. Lots of good ideas related to this as well: we could use the holy calendar as an oracular tool, and the teenaged characters could have all sorts of adventures, romance and such while the players have the nigh-manageable job of breathing life into the Orlanthi world. (For those who don’t know, let me just say that Glorantha is deep, but Orlanthi part of the world is perhaps the best known to most.) Everybody in the group actually knows Glorantha in advance, so we have a pretty good basis for this.

Careful deliberation almost swung the battle in favour of DubaiPunk, but ultimately the comfortable lure of fantasy gaming proved too strong for us: I would play my first Glorantha-based campaign now! I realize that “Orlanthi clan life during Lunar occupation” is totally old hat for Glorantha gamers, of course, but I like the concept and figure that it’s a good match for the Solar System, which lives on bildungsroman and all that; I figure that I’ll steal as much from the Chronicles of Prydain as humanly possible content-wise, and I’ll be pretty much set. I originally learned my Glorantha from King of Dragon Pass, so something like this should go swimmingly insofar as setting familiarity goes.

Creating the Clan

I naturally didn’t have much crunch prepared for the game as we’d just chosen to play it, but we still opted to do character creation before breaking for the night; it’s pretty easy to revise stuff in Solar System, so it’d be no big deal if we needed to change anything at the beginning of the first real session of play.

Of course we could only create characters once we’d managed to create the clan, this being a flavourful Orlanthi game and all. This we did relatively freeform: I narrated the beginnings of the world from the Age of Storm forward all through to the third age and the Lunar occupation, asking questions about the clan that the players answered. The resulting clan emphasises Odayla the Hunter in their cult life as well as Barntar, of whom they know an unique myth about slash-and-burn farming. The clan’s general history is one of conservative, seclusionist hermitage far away from the centers of civilization; they have an ancestral grudge against the elves, and one of their number was a big hero at the time of the Lunar invasion and the consequent resistance fighting that went on for years; said hero has now retired to obscure anonymity in the far reaches of the clan tula.

The characters themselves are harmless teenagers with little weight to them so far; this is fine, considering that they’re just children still, and will gain in history through play. The clan tula is apparently in the Far Place, and while we didn’t worry about the details at the time, I might simply make them part of the Bachad tribe for which I have a detailed write-up here in Zin Letters #3 – a surprising use for something I didn’t expect to need when the zine came out last year. If not Bachad, then Amad, which is even farther to the edge of the Sartarite civilization. I could also adapt Garrik clan from the same zine to get a bunch of NPCs and such right away, but I’m inclined to start from scratch to not trip on too much material.

In case you’re interested, here’s some of what I did for my summer vacation:

I made a big book about dead people last summer

• Over the summer I finalized the Tuovinen family genealogy and produced it for publication. Because everybody asks, no, I didn’t do the actual research myself – I just took the research database collated by Valto Puustinen and produced a book out of it by editing, arranging and laying it out. Wrote some history bits and such, too. Quite a job, probably the largest book I’ve ever made. Apparently my paternal line has lived in the Upper Savo wilderness for the last 400 years, having arrived here among the first Savonian colonists from southern Savo during the Swedish drive to populate the eastern frontiers of what used to be the kingdom of Sweden. The target audience has been happy, so I’d say it was a successful mission.
• In the fall we had the local conventions, but also Essen Spiel, at which we had a successful booth. This was the first time I had primary responsibility for a booth at a major fair, and it was pretty stressful – we needed to figure out furniture, shipping, marketing materials and partnership negotiations and all. I spent major time figuring out certain financing arrangements that ultimately didn’t materialize, too. Luckily the sales were acceptable and the crew was very motivated and high-spirited, so all’s good in that regard.
• I read and played OSR games and bought a lot of adventures for the webstore. In fact, here’s a list of what we have – it’s a pretty good one, being as how it’s been compiled by Jim Raggi for the most part. Plenty of interesting stuff in there.

Probably something else happened too, I just don’t remember it right now. No matter – more relevant is, what will I write about at the blog before the year is out? I have a new Glorantha-based Solar System rpg campaign at least, that deserves some words (especially as I really should write down my thoughts on it to arrange them). No further plans yet, but perhaps something surfaces. Ah – actually, I should write a bit about the good OSR things I’ve seen, just in case others are wondering which of the indistinguishable adventure modules with colorful names are worthwhile.

A programming game

I like the idea of programming game – I like programming and I like games, and these two tastes should by reason go well together. (Hmm, surprisingly Wikipedia even has an article on the topic.) In practice, however, I encounter enjoyable programming games only rarely. This seems to be mostly because a programming game is by nature a rather geeky subject matter, so the creator of such a game is unlikely to give the game a pleasing interface. I’m not nearly hardcore enough to compile my own C-code just to play a game, even as I like the idea of Crobots and similar games.

Manufactoria here is a change of pace in that it’s a programming game with nice pacing and funny color; instead of just having a single huge programming task like writing a robot AI in a real programming language you get a set of puzzle levels that each provide ascending levels of difficulty. The subject matter is funny too: you have to build a limited sort of Turing machine in the form of factory assembly line for the purpose of testing and programming various robots, one for each level. You start by testing simple robot lava lamps (discard if the tape includes three or more ones) and advance to robot tanks (accept any binary string >15), politicians (accept if there are exactly twice as many ones than zeroes) and even engineers (accept all middle-reflected symmetric sequences). These are of course relatively simple tasks for a full modern programming language, but it’s surprisingly tricky to do some of these things when you only have a tape for storing information and a limited space in which to construct machine state interactions sufficient for fulfilling the given task.

Aside from the topic that’s sure to please a programmer, Manufactoria shines as a puzzle game: each of the game’s levels provides a different task with the same tools, which increases playability; the full complexity of the game is discovered through a nicely increasing difficulty curve; there is no artificial difficulty injected; skills are transportable from level to level and even from real life to the game – anybody experienced with pre-’00s programming languages will have an edge in this game. The fact that you can measure the efficiency of your solutions by the time it takes for your sorting machine to fulfill the task or by the number of components you need to do it is a nice bonus when seeking dedicated mastery of the game.

The bonus feature

Tetris Hell is a brilliant joke game with a very simple premise. So simple in fact, that the game was designed in a webcomic for all practical purposes. I’d seen the comic in question a few years back so when Markku showed me the game last weekend I recognized the crazy idea as curiously familiar. As can be imagined from the image, this game is rather… difficult. Good luck getting even one line.

The plan at this point is to make available a goodly stock of my own designs and a selection of the Arkenstone retail section, one of the more comprehensive indie game libraries out there. That and the typical Forge-style program of demos, discussion and after-hours play should carry the convention nicely. If I can make a flight over the Atlantic profitable as a convention plan, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.

I’m also looking for other interested publishers who might want to join us at the Spiel. The booth is small this time around (unless I get something like over a dozen committed participants, in which case we’ll consider an expansion), but it’ll be cheap and a good venue for getting to know the Spiel and how to conduct yourself in the largest tabletop gaming convention in the world. Independent designer/publishers only; that’s part of the concept.

I’ll likely write more about this later in the summer. For now, if you’d like to join the booth, be a booth monkey or just meet us at Spiel, do let me know!

As I’ve indicated before, my intent is to make a pdf version of the World of Near available. In fact, I would have liked to have it available four months ago, roughly. However, my illustrator and main man, Jari, has been failing with his scheduling, causing this particular project to get delayed several times over the winter. Particularly, Jari has been writing his Master’s thesis, which was considered of more import than getting the pdf out in time, considering that both a paper book and a free html version of the work are already available.

The reason for why I can’t finish the pdf layout of the book without Jari’s assistance is that the pdf version is in color and has more art than the book; Jari has to design the new look and illustrations for the work. I could make an artless version available, but what’s the point when there is a nice HTML version out in the Internet? I’d rather take as long as it takes in this case, as a delayed work is hopefully a better option than a sub-quality one when a nice minimalistic version of the work is available.

I hope that our delay does not reduce your interest in subsidizing my work, dear reader. This is not an ideal schedule for attracting new people to take a look at The Shadow of Yesterday, but I hope that the interested folks who have been asking about it can make do with the HTML edition while we see about getting that PDF done.

I installed Doom last week out of a random impulse, as has been my wont through the last couple of years now and then. I’ve been gearing up to play the Inferno (the third episode of the original game) on Ultraviolence (the fourth difficulty level), mostly because I played through Knee-Deep in the Dead and Shores of Hell (the first two episodes) a couple of years ago, I seem to remember. Inferno is hard, though! I might have to gather some momentum by looking at Shores of Hell again; I’m not quite convinced that I actually finished it last time I had the game installed. Perhaps a run through that will hone my rusty skills enough to allow me to finish the Slough of Despair (the second level of Inferno) with some ammunition left.

Anyway, some thoughts on Doom follow. This is a random lot, just some musings from playing the game.

Making the game go

Getting an old game like Doom to work on a modern machine is not trivial, but neither is it difficult: the game’s code has been released to free distribution for a long time, and there are many “source ports” that essentially replace the original executable with modern code that accesses modern 3d-acceleration and whatnot directly from Windows. I had to trawl a bit to choose a good port; the one I ended up installing for now is Doomsday with the Snowberry load interface. The reason was mostly that this was what I installed last time I played the game, and Doomsday seems to do the trick. I also wanted a port that can run Heretic in case I get off my rocker and want to really get into this nostalgia thing.

The “thing” of Doomsday in the Doom retro-scene (yes, there is such a thing) is that it supports higher-resolution graphical glitter and higher-grade sound than the more original source ports, making it a sort of beautified viewport on the old game. Being able to run even Hexen (which deviates from the original Doom engine somewhat)  is also a plus – I’ve never played Strife, the last Doom-engine game, so lacking support for that isn’t too big a deal for now. The important thing is that Doomsday is trivial to install, feeding it with wad files (the actual data of individual games) is easy, and the game itself works essentially like it used to in 1993. The system seems to have plenty of customization options, too, but so far I’ve been happy with what comes out of the box. Easy to recommend this source port over Dosbox or such if you appreciate usability, playability and some audiovisual glitter.

One practical point that will throw the casual Doomer here: if you’re planning to install Doomsday, make sure you grab the “beta” development version and not the stable release. I haven’t had any stability problems with the beta, but the important reason is that only the beta includes the new “Snowberry” game loading interface and not the “Kickstart” thing that comes with the stable release. Snowberry is considerably superior in usability, so if you’re basically clueless about the Doom scene like I am, you’ll rather have the easier system.

Another practical point if you’ve never reinstalled Doom through a source port: the tradition with these source ports is that they do not come with the .wad files that include the actual game data, such as level maps. Each game basically has one big (some megabytes, that is) file named “doom.wad” or whatever. You need to copy the files for the games you want to play from the original disks, buy a compilation of some sort for a couple of dollars, or perhaps pirate them off the Internet. No big deal once you know about it, and most people interested in this sort of thing will probably have some version of the game stashed somewhere, I imagine.

Doom’s a great game

Replaying a bit of Doom here and there over the last week (some few hours in total; busy with work) has once again affirmed for me that insofar as my personal preferences go, Doom is possibly the best game in the 1st person shooter genre. I have a pretty controversial relationship with this type of game, no doubt caused in part by my changing relationship to computer gaming over the years, growing up (I was just 12 years old when Doom came out, for instance) and so on. Still, discounting the personal angle, there is plenty to appreciate in Doom even for somebody who never played it in any length when it came out. Consider:

• Doom has a very straightforward control scheme, which makes it easy to play. This is probably a rather critical reason for why I haven’t really gotten into 1st person shooters after Duke Nukem 3D or so; I remember vividly how Half-Life, once I got around to trying it, didn’t really entice me due to the hassleful mouse-based aiming and other developments that had happened since Doom. I much prefer the balance of chaos vs. control in Doom, in which I can usually move and aim somewhat purposefully even when surprised by enemies; in Half-Life, as memory has it, I would just flop around like a dead fish in panic, shooting at the ceiling or floor while the enemies killed me.
• Doom is about massive enemy firepower advantage vs. superior player mobility. Key concerns in play are calm execution of basic maneuvers (dodging, shooting), strategic positioning (choosing where to engage the enemy), preserving resources (ammo, health) against massive enemy forces and not getting disoriented and surprised in the creepy corridors of hell. All this works impressively well, the game’s playability is very high: simple ingredients come together to form a logical and suspenseful play experience.
• The pace of the game in Doom is emergent, which I think is rather clever. Fast and chaotic sequences make way to tense sneaking as the player finds wise; the enemies are stupid, but overwhelmingly powerful, necessitating understanding their behavior and planning your play accordingly. Play is broken into levels and there are clear caps on all resources, which keeps the constant resource death cycle under control and helps pace the play and reduce backtracking.

I’m the direct opposite of an expert in 1st person shooters of today, so for all I know they might have virtues that I could appreciate if I ever would get around to installing some suitably heavy computer equipment and buying a game.  In practice I don’t care enough about the genre, it seems. Still, I apparently like Doom enough to reinstall it every few years. Perhaps it is because of nostalgia, but either way, I sure have fun with this game. I’ll have to make a point of pushing through Inferno once more; if I succeed, perhaps I might have what it takes to tackle Thy Flesh Consumed as well – I never played Ultimate Doom during the ’90s, so it’s an entirely new episode to me.

A modest proposal (actually, a great idea)

An idea came to me today while playing hide and seek with Cacodemons in the  Slough of Despair without even a single bullet to my name. Namely, why doesn’t Doom have an adversial two-player mode where one player controls the monsters? The historical answer is obviously that this didn’t occur during original development, but what with people still fiddling with the game’s code today, why not add something like this? I’m not familiar with Doom’s executable code myself, but it seems to me that there is no fundamental obstacle in the game’s structure for overriding the monster AI, building an appropriate play interface for a monster player and so on. (Nothing fundamental aside from the amount of work involved, I mean to say – of course it’d require a modicum of design work and quite a bit of programming to create what amounts to a real-time strategy game, even one that can use graphical material from the existing game.) I could see a whole new dimension of challenge in the game by adding a human adversary to what is already essentially a strategic exercise in movement, kill-zoning, exploration and objective-priorization. It’d be sort of like a real-time strategy game for the monster player, who could work out proactive patrol routes or whatever for his slow, inflexible forces against the death on two feet that is the Doom marine. It’d be relatively easy to involve monster in-fighting to limit and complicate unbalanced strategies like bunching too many monsters together or whatever.

In fact, why isn’t there a game like this out there somewhere? The only one that I know about is the zombie game… Left4Dead, which I hear involves monsters vs. heroes multiplayer. The game apparently doesn’t approach the challenge with proper RTS tools, though, but rather places individual players in the shoes of individual monsters. Not quite the same thing.

I’m not much of a fan of Doom deathmatches due to the high inherent speed of the marine in comparison with the demons – what is an unique conceit of the single-player game makes multiplayer play pretty ridiculous to my eyes, what with the marines bouncing around and flashing over great distances in the blink of an eye. It’s not quite in the spirit of the thing, not like that alternative multiplayer mode I envision above. The same goes for the cooperative mode, really – I remember being quite disappointed with the Doom cooperative multiplayer mode, which uses the same equipment distributions as the deathmatch mode, completely ruining the single-player level designs insofar as equipment scarcity is considered.

I think it’s something of a testament for the game’s design that I don’t really have much else to suggest in terms of improvement. I seem to remember that the lack of real architectural 3D (being able to have tunnels above and below each other on a map) in the Doom engine was an annoying limitation in the ’90s, but I don’t really mind even that today. Doesn’t seem to be affecting the playability in practice.

Plans

I don’t really expect to have much time for gaming through the coming month, but at this point it seems feasible to dedicate whatever time I’ll have to remastering Inferno. I already replayed the first level to preserve more ammunition for the second level, so perhaps I’ll get through it this time around. If going gets too rough, I’ll leave Inferno for a bit and return to the Shores of Hell until my skills equal the challenge once more. I’ve managed this 15 years ago, so surely I can do it now.