Category: Roleplaying

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Roleplaying

That Narrow Window of Opportunity

Overheard at Bo’s birthday party:

We use to play Dungeons and Dragons maybe four times a week, we’d rush over to his house straight after school

….

You know, if we’d had internet porn back in the day, I’d never have bothered with D&D.

Bonus piece of social interaction advice:

  • Acknowledging that you watch internet porn – perfectly acceptable and unremarkable.
  • Mentioning specific sites ( Yeah, I used to go there until I mistyped and got google’s do you feel lucky result…) – somewhat uncomfortable.
  • Going into the pros and cons of downloads vs. streaming… (but I need to set up my playlist…) – time to change the subject.
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Resources Roleplaying

H.P.Lovecraft Historical Society’s Prop Fonts

Didn’t I link to or bookmark this before? HPLHS Prop Fonts. Period fonts for Call of Cthulhu props, free for downloading. You can never have enough fonts.

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Roleplaying

If you read one game in your life

James Wallis’ The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen is probably the most entertaining set of game instructions ever written, delivered as it is by the Baron himself in his inimitable style. And it is now available for download in a new, expanded edition.

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Comics Roleplaying

Amber Thoughts

These were supposed to be thoughts on how I’d want to run an Amber game, but I didn’t get too far because of digressions into literary criticism.

First, we use just the first five books as our setting bible: Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, Sign of the Unicorn, The Hand of Oberon and The Courts of Chaos – only the Corwin books count. By removing Merlin’s story from happening and ditching everything revealed in those later five books we get rid of a whole bunch of inconsistencies and some horrendous cumulative power-creep.

Merlin’s version of reality sneaked into the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game because the Logrus is mentioned in Courts of Chaos but demonstrated only in the Merlin books. So no Logrus tendrils in my game (or Benedict parrying invisible oponents either).

The tone and feel of the two series differs considerably. While the Merlin books are fantasy, as in genre fantasy shelved and marketed as such, and have (like Dave Langford astutely commented) the feel of a high-level AD&D campaign where the characters are weighed down by a slew of magic items, powers and artifacts, the Corwin books are Sword and Sorcery: published in the Seventies, this is first-generation fantasy, still fresh, still a shiny toy for Science Fiction writers (and readers); Phillip Jose Farmer and Michael Moorcock are clear influences, but Zelazney throws in Medieval Romance literature, Hardboiled detective fiction, Alice in Wonderland and Science Fiction’s love of big ideas and nifty extrapolations.

One notable difference between what I’m calling “Sword and Sorcery” here and second-generation fantasy, which is post-D&D, is the attitude to magic. In the first Amber series, magic is still mysterious and dangerous, subtle and sanity-shattering. You don’t have to be crazy to be a magician, but it helps (i.e, Dworkin and Brand). The magic we see worked by Corwin, Oberon and others looks like poetic improvisation, creative manipulation of shadow that resembled legend rather than the systematic spellcasting Merlin uses in the later books, which is very Vancian – that is, D&Dish.

About that power-creep: part of the appeal of the Amber books is that the scope keeps getting broader, with a series of revelations building up and the characters using their new insights to leverage established and newly-revealed powers in novel ways. That dynamic works beautifully in a roleplaying game. Even in the Corwin books, you wonder how the setting remained static for thousands of years if it could be upset so quickly, but in the Merlin books the power accumulates at an exponential* rate that’s just ridiculous. Ludicrous, even.

But back to the time period thing – Corwin’s books occur, according to this Amber Timeline some time around the period they were written – 1968-1977 or so. I want to keep my game close to that, so in my world it would be 1981 or so – no cellphones and WWW on shadow earth!

* – thanks, Ori.

Categories
Roleplaying

roleplaying and writing craft

Both Vered and Israel take me to task about my previous post, saying that real reality is just as fabricated as game reality. Israel at least acknowledges that roleplaying games foreground this constructed nature. I still think that physical reality actually has something objective underlying all the interpretations and flawed impressions. I also think (and this is perhaps closer to Sheppard’s points) that there’s something both exciting and disturbing in translating the artifact of “soft” improvised storytelling performance to “hard” textual narrative, and in feeding the more concrete but further removed account back into the primary experience of play.

Anyway, here’s another essay that touches on the relationship between writing and roleplaying games. In response to the Clarkesworld article about the influence of roleplaying games on modern fantasy writers,  Marie Brennan, a fantasy novelist who’s an actual roleplayer (her site links to the site of the campaign she ran, complete with session recaps, some of them far more partial than others – although nothing as succinct as some of ours), writes about how RPGs have made her a better writer. This in a bit of a contrast to the Clarkesworld thing, where most of the writers interviewed seem to say that roleplaying games let them exercise their imaginations a bit, but they’d all much rather focus their creative energies on fiction: Brennan actually talks about how roleplaying can change the way you think about story and character and plot.

By coincidence, I was trying to articulate my dissatisfaction with Asaf Ashery’s Waiting in the Wings, aka סימנטוב to us Hebrew readers (beyond the usual “bastard wrote a novel and I didn’t” joy every original Israeli fantasy work inspires). I can say it feels as if a second act is missing, that fortune tellers using New Age blather as plot-device constructing technobabble really doesn’t excite me, etc. I can also use roleplaying advice terminology and say that the main character gets de-protagonized by the writer’s pet NPCs, i.e, powerful secondary characters hand her big chunks of the plot’s resolution through no effort of her own.

It was the countess who turned me on to thinking of fiction in roleplaying terms; by looking at the characters and action of a book as though they were the result of some imaginary gaming group’s actual play, you can rationalize the flaws in the fiction – and highlight them for either entertainment or critical analysis. For instance (and I know this is a trivial example), that strong witch queen character with a fascinating background that shows up in the begining of Phillip Pulman’s Subtle Knife and then vanishes for most of the book, except for a small and pointless scene later on? The countess pegged her nicely as a guest-NPC played by Greif. That may evoke a smile (well, if you’ve had the pleasure of gaming with the relevant party), but it also highlights a character that ends up a as a gaudy distraction to the reader.