House Systems and Forced Fits

Regarding a previous post on why I don’t repurpose discarded sub-systems, Chris Angelucci asks:

What does this mean for companies with "house systems?" Will any game concept end up being a forced-fit?

I’d argue that mostly this doesn’t become the case, for a couple of reasons. House systems are often created by an RPG company’s key designer, who then goes on to design, or influence, later iterations. The core rules think like that designer does, and so do its later expressions. So while you might not like Joe Green’s take on superheroes, or think that the JoeGreenRules fit that genre well, they’re likely internally consistent.

On a related point, the design concept is, explicitly or otherwise, to do the JoeGreenRules take on a new genre. The core audience for a rules platform wants to see what happens when it’s applied to space opera, or swords ‘n’ sandals epics, or whatever. They’re invested in that game and way of thinking already, and want to see a game that arises in the meeting point between the game rules they know and a genre they know. White Wolf fans aren’t necessarily looking for the platonic ideal game about modern fairies, so much as they probably think the ideal game about fairies will be Changeling—a variation of the core rules and approach they already dig.

To cite a counterexample, the Ars Magica rule engine might not have been the ideal basis for Rune, the game of hyper-competitive, Viking mayhem I did for Atlas. But given that the concept itself was so far removed from anything that had been done before, and that it was a stretch for our timeline and playtesting resources, it was the right choice practically. To invent a new core engine, and make that work, and then make the GM-swapping, point build encounter superstructure also work on top of that, lay beyond our time budget.

If the call to adapt the Rune video game had come just a few years later, the D20 license would have been in play, which would have served the pragmatic aspect of the project and been a better fit. We’d likely have been able to draw from a bigger playtest pool and could maybe have sold enough copies to justify the long development window its ambition required.

Equinenimity

Sarah Monette applies her experience of real-life horses to list five ways in which the actual creature differs from its portrayal in fantasy fiction:

Diana Wynne Jones famously deduced that the horses of Fantasyland are vegetative bicycles. Here are some ways that real horses are anything but:

1. Horses are very large animals. This is something that you can know in the abstract, as we all do, and still be taken aback by when interacting with an actual horse. Horses take up space. Their heads are massive chunks of bone. Even when they're being affectionate, they're still a good eight to ten times larger than a human being, and they are proportionately stronger. [Read on...]

I am not a horse person and will totally cop to a nagging anxiety whenever I write a fantasy scene with riding in it. Sure that I will get called out for reality-defying nonsense, I keep the horses in the background to the maximum extent possible. Fortunately the latest novel is set in a city, with lots of walking and almost no horses testing its verisimilitude.

Another problem, though, is that real horses are disjunctive in most narratives. As Sarah describes, they’re fragile and headstrong animals, both of which traits have a tendency to suddenly disrupt a protagonist’s momentum. (A recent headline reinforces their fragility: the show Luck, in which that fragility was a major theme, has had to cease production after a string of horse deaths.) Well-constructed narratives don’t provide much space for accidents or distractions. If an accident leads to a crucial plot development, it suddenly becomes a contrivance. If it exists only to show that accidents happen, it’s failing the rule of fictional parsimony, which allows only for events that drive the story or in some other way relate to its overall throughline.

Hence the convention of the herbivorous bicycle.

Don’t Read This Book

Evil Hat has released the cover image for Don’t Read This Book, its upcoming anthology of short fiction set in the Don’t Rest Your Head game setting. The insomniac protagonists of DRYH slip from our world to a surreal parallel realm of gothic strangeness, fearing both that they will never sleep again and that they will awaken, losing their strange new powers. My contribution to the book, “Don’t Lose Your Shit”, tells the tale of a recent inductee into this unending night, as he discovers a weird convenience store on the head-pounding borderland of sleep and waking. There in its beverage refrigerator awaits a troubling array of unfamiliar energy drinks, which hold out the promise of both doom and salvation to its haunted and shuffling denizens.

Note the impressive roster of writers assembled by the book’s editor, the fearless and peerless Chuck Wendig. I await announcement of a release date with hallucinatory fervor.

The Birds: Brno

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The Leng Connection

A Ripped From the History Books Scenario Hook for Trail of Cthulhu

The exact extent to which the 1938-39 Tibet expedition led by explorer Ernst Schafer served the Nazi agenda remains a matter of controversy. After the war, Schafer claimed to have come by his posting as an SS Hauptstrumfuhrer unwillingly. Also unclear is how successfully he derailed Himmler’s goal for the trip—to have Ahnenerbe pseudoscientists measure Tibetan skulls in an attempt to prove that Siddhattha Gotama, the historical Buddha, had been an Aryan in good standing.

Perhaps the greatest mystery is what Himmler thought he stood to gain by proving this, given the incompatibility of Nazi ideology and Buddhist thought.

If we fictionalize it a little, though, we get a Trail of Cthulhu scenario of high altitude high adventure.

When a politically fervid fellow inquirer into the mythos conspiracy goes missing in Tibet, the investigators follow his trail. They discover his plan to infect Himmler’s minions with contagious madness, by leading the Ahnenerbe to the Plateau of Leng. Do they help him destroy Nazi scum—or see the vast potential for backfire, and work to thwart him?

Source: Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, Stephen Batchelor

Disorienting Exposition

In fiction set in unfamiliar times and places, it often falls to the author to explain details of the world well-known to the characters but not to the reader. How straightforwardly to lay this out is a matter of style, and therefore taste. I tend to want to deliver it in a compact way and get on to the story it’s supporting. Some readers prefer obscured approaches that take longer but don’t necessarily signal themselves as expository—world detail through dialogue being a key technique.

A more complex technique presents expository detail about the world as if addressing a reader already familiar with it. Most often you'll see this in SF novels. The narrator rattles off terms and describes situations without full explanatory context.

According to the beat analysis system found in Hamlet's Hit Points, these mystifying references serve as question beats. They arouse our anxiety and our curiosity, impelling us to read on, in search of clarification. As we figure out the world through additional context, we feel counterpointing up beats, when those questions are answered.

This might be seen as the SF version of a common literary fiction gambit, where details of the story being retold are teased but not fully laid out. In both cases these can substitute for the basic building blocks of most fiction, dramatic and procedural scenes.

How much one digs this is another matter of taste. Personally, I prefer to be invested in a character, to hope for her success and fear for her failure, before I’m asked to puzzle through an alien future. Other readers might be perfectly happy with pure world extrapolation, without all that pesky story and character always rearing its head.

Carts and Horses

Apropos of a previous post, Josh W asks: How often do you find yourself budding systems off and turning them into other distinct games? If it happens often enough, how do you deduce the design through-line that subsystem fits?

For reasons implicit in your second question, this happens to me exactly never. I’ve certainly created sub-systems only to realize that they don’t fit the design through-line. Usually they interpret the design goals too literally, or are disappear down a rabbit-hole of unnecessary simulation. Because of this, they are also usually flawed in and of themselves and thus go to the great discard pile in the sky.

Never have I accidentally created a rules subset that would work fine, if only I were working on a different game. In my view, building a game and its core activity around a nifty rules idea is a recipe for disaster. Start with the activity you think will make for engaging play, then facilitate that with rules that enable it in as simple and elegant a manner as possible.

Sometimes I do encounter games that feel like they sparked first from a system idea, with the core activity yoked in to serve it. If it even has a clear core activity. When you ask a designer to describe his game and he starts with a game mechanic, that’s a warning sign of a game designed from an abstract rules concept outwards. (Or maybe he’s just lousy at pitching.) For a few categories, like abstract games, design from sub-system out may be desirable. Often, though, you'll get the feeling during play that you are working for the rules rather than having them work for you.

The Birds: Happiness

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Precisely Subjective

At Gaming as Women, Darla Magdalene-Shockley posits that subjective reward mechanics, dispensed for entertaining roleplaying, carry the risk of unconscious gender bias. Regarding actual play with Paranoia XP, she observes:

[W]e are all socialized very strongly to view women in certain ways. We expect women to be responsible, do the boring administrative work, and in general shut down the fun.  We emphatically do not expect women to be silly.  So women are less likely to be silly, and everyone is less likely to notice when they are.  The Paranoia GM (despite being quite the stand-up guy) is less likely to notice and reward it.

Unexamined assumptions at the gaming table, including those surrounding gender, can certainly play havoc with what is meant to be a facilitator of gaming fun. Many people first came to RPGs as a structured way of overcoming shyness. Quiet, uncertain or casual players, whether they’re that way out of socialization or inclination, or both, will get left behind by rules that do this—and maybe feel uncomfortably singled out when the GM takes compensating measures.

On the other hand, all games inevitably favor certain personal traits over others. The vast corpus of traditional games reward math savvy, recollection of complex rules, and willingness to spend time poring over rules text searching for optimal character build choices. In this context it hardly seems unreasonable that players with confident performance and improv skills will prosper in games falling on the story side of the spectrum.

A middle ground can be found by narrowing and defining the subjectively rewarded activity. The Dying Earth and its descendants, Skulduggery and The Gaean Reach (which I’m working on now), all mechanically encourage you to weaving taglines (supplied lines of dialogue) into the session. They bribe you to talk like Jack Vance’s characters, an essential element in creating the feeling that you’re exploring his worlds.

The GM does judge how effectively you use a given tagline, but by gauging the reactions of the group to your bon mots, which takes into account an observable, gestalt subjectivity if not objectivity. Where the instruction to “be entertaining” is broad and hard to define, the metrics for taglines are clear and simple. If, for whatever, reason you’re less than voluble, taglines give you highly structured permission to seize spotlight time.

Kickfinisher?

In the latest episode of the That's How We Roll podcast, hosts Fred Hicks and Chris Hanrahan talk to author Chuck Wendig about his work on Evil Hat’s burgeoning fiction line. I tuned in hoping to hear Chuck on Don’t Read This Book, an upcoming anthology set in the Don’t Rest Your Head universe, to which I contributed a piece. Much of the run time goes to their inaugural Spirit of the Century novel trilogy, Dinocalypse.

The top of the chat deals with issues well-known to anyone plying the waters of tie-in fiction. There’s the eternal question of balancing material that serves the story at hand with choices that put across the broader property. Then there’s the parallel, game-specific matter of how much license authors are afforded to reference or sidestep game rules.

What I learned from the podcast arises from Evil Hat’s Kickstarter strategy. As someone on the brink of a crowd-funded project or two, I found it a salutary exercise in preconception adjustment. Fred talks about the value of having material not just in the notional phase, but ready to deliver to funders, instant gratification style. This tells me that an issue I’ve been concerned about is actually a plus. Perhaps taking the name of the main crowd-funding organ too literally, I’ve been assuming that pledgers want in on the ground floor and might shy from projects already in a high state of readiness. Why make happen what has already happened? Instead Fred and crew indicate that pledgers want something the creators have already invested their time and money in. It’s more about putting the project over the top than providing seed capital. If so, it’s another example of the culture of a web entity moving away from the assumptions of its original creators.

With benefit of hindsight, it might be called Kickfinisher.

Blood of the City

Paizo has announced my next novel for their Pathfinder Tales fiction line, due in August. Here there be sell-text:

Luma is a cobblestone druid, a canny fighter and spellcaster who can read the chaos of Magnimar's city streets like a scholar reads books. Together, she and her siblings in the powerful Derexhi family form one of the most infamous and effective mercenary companies in the city, solving problems for the city's wealthy elite. Yet despite being the oldest child, Luma gets little respect—perhaps due to her half-elven heritage. When a job gone wrong lands Luma in the fearsome prison called the Hells, it's only the start of Luma's problems. For a new web of bloody power politics is growing in Magnimar, and it may be that those Luma trusts most have become her deadliest enemies...

From visionary game designer and author Robin D. Laws comes a new urban fantasy adventure of murder, betrayal, and political intrigue set in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

400-page mass market paperback

ISBN–13: 978-1-60125-456-6

---

Thanks to the Paizo marketing department for upgrading me from legendary (as per the equivalent text for The Worldwound Gambit) to visionary.

Blood of the City stands alone from the previous book, though there might just be a wee crossover tucked in there.... It eschews the present tense a faction of Worldwound readers found worrying, in favor of the fantasy-standard past tense. Proceed to mourn or celebrate, as your tastes dictate.

Place your vengeance-soaked pre-orders at the product page.

The Birds: Redefine

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Lovecraft’s Influence and This Month’s See P. XX

This month’s edition of See P. XX takes the 75^th anniversary of H. P. Lovecraft’s death as an occasion for Pelgrane Press regulars, including Kenneth Hite and yours truly, to examine his influence. I’m also on board with more on the play value and psychology of GUMSHOE point spends. There’s also a call for playtesting on an intriguing new fantasy game from Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo, a publisher’s look at freelancer payments, and a Steve Dempsey demo for The Esoterrorists. Check it out!

Adventures in Title Treatment

As a dry run for New Tales of the Yellow Sign, I’ve decided to disseminate a free short story to the various ebook venues. Longtime blog readers may remember “The Star Makers” as a piece I once released into the wild in PDF format. This contemporary supernatural adventure features Orlando Frank, who turned his back on the family occult crimebusting business to pursue his muse as a mildly famous indie rocker.

In this exploration of self-publishing, I’m envisioning a tiny, bewinged John Nephew on my shoulder, advising me not to do anything he wouldn't. In other words, parsimony must rule the day. So while I’m commissioning a gorgeous cover from Jerome Huguenin for NTYS, I can’t justify the cost for a sheerly promotional effort. Which is to say, it falls to me to put together an at least creditable virtual cover.

The story’s contemporary period and music scene backdrop allow me to reach for something photographic, sparing the vulnerable masses from my attempt at drawing. For the design vocabulary I’m looking at something you might see on a book by Chuck Klosterman or Sarah Vowell. A simplified band poster motif seems like it fits the bill, and, if need be, provides a template for future variations. The poster’s guitar neck pentacle fuses the rock ‘n’ roll and supernatural elements.

So here's what I’ve come up with, in two variations. They’re not going to keep any actual graphic designers up at night, but I think they fall within the standard of the freebie story ebook cover. Which of these grabs your eye?

Before you hit send on the comment button, remember that these have to play in at the very small 155 pixel height a book cover gets in an Amazon search result. Does this change your perception any?

Flames Rising Interview

As part of Flames Rising’s ongoing interview series with the authors of Paizo’s Pathfinder Tales line, Jeremy L. C. Jones puts the questions to me regarding The Worldwound Gambit, novel development, and the essence of a compelling protagonist. Along the way I drop a hint or two surrounding my unannounced next Pathfinder novel, talk up Hamlet’s Hit Points as  a plotting aid, and provide aspiring writers with either encouraging discouragement or discouraging encouragement. Check it out.

Back to the Edge

In a move sure to activate the salivary glands of ludobibliophiles throughout the reality grid, Atlas Games has announced the Over the Edge 20^th Anniversary Edition. The classic and seminal roleplaying game of weird contemporary conspiracy, by Jonathan Tweet with yours truly, resurfaces from the depths of the Terminal in a lavish limited printing, with deluxe binding and premium interior. Extras include new essays by Jonathan, Greg Stolze, Keith Baker and John Nephew—and a newly commissioned full-color map.

With its concentration on secrets, Jonathan recently referred to his Al Amarja setting as a product of its era. With the battle between chaos and control ever-ratcheting, I feel like it’s never been timelier.

(Can it really have been that long? If this game is twenty years old, that means my career in hobby game is exactly that old, too.)

Tie on your best silk noose and head on over to the product page.

The Birds: Parrot

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Repairer of Reputations 25% Off in Pelgrane’s Hidden Gems Sale

My Trail of Cthulhu adaptation of the Robert Chambers classic story The Repairer of Reputations is available at a discount until Mar 16^th. It’s part of Pelgrane’s Hidden Treasures sale, along with Lorefinder (GUMSHOE/Pathfinder), Brief Cases (Mutant City Blues), and Invasive Procedures (Trail of Cthulhu / Fear Itself.) Go check out Simon Rogers’ theories on why they haven’t received the sales love they deserve, then click through to pick ‘em up cheap.

Six Difficulties of Fiction Plotting

1. How do they know X?

2. Why do they not know X?

3. How do they meet up?

4. What prevents them from meeting up?

5. How do they contact each other?

6. What prevents them from contacting each other?

The Brain Printer

A Ripped From the Headlines Scenario Hook for Ashen Stars

In a development that raises the prospect of bespoke organs created with cells extruded through a 3D printer, a patient in a June 2011 procedure received a new windpipe grown specifically for him. 3D scanning technology provided the template for an exact replica of his original windpipe, sculpted from polymer around a glass mold.

In the future timeline of Ashen Stars, the utopian space empire known as the Combine once assiduously policed its ban on sentient-species cloning. Like so much else, this has fallen by the wayside in the frontier region of the Bleed. But so far it’s proven impossible to create true replicas of intelligent beings—you can make a physical copy, and even age it, but you can’t recreate all of the experiences that shape personal identity.

That may have changed, the lasers discover, when they get the terms of their latest contract. Famed inventor Sian Sar hires them to track down her ex-husband, Rog Trainor, who, without her knowledge, used her own scanning technology to make a complete cellular scan of her brain. She believes that he’s printed out a meat version of her brain, and is using it for competitive advantage—putting her genius to work on the same technologies her company is feverishly developing. Their mission: to bring Trainor to justice, and destroy the counterfeit of her brain.

The twist: Trainor has not only grown a replica of his ex-wife’s brain, but installed it in a clone copy of her body. The result is a new person, who shares Sar’s experiences and personality up to a point, but then diverged. She may not want to remain imprisoned and working for Trainor, but she doesn't want to be murdered, either. Do the lasers fulfill their contract, or accept her claims of full personhood?