Gaming, introspection
25 April 2010 21:46![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amulI've been feeling the need to play a tabletop RPG pretty badly lately. For various reasons, Darth Ambivalence's games don't give me the particular fix that I'm craving. Oh, don't get me wrong, his games give me the role-playing fix that I often crave, they just don't give me the particular flavor I'm craving right now....
I suppose it is a bit like wanting to go shrooming, but your dealer only has acid on him. They're both trips down the rabbit hole, but they're still two different experiences. Sometimes, it doesn't matter how many shrooms you eat, you still crave a tab.
With several of the GMs back in Pittsburgh, our games frequently became a metaphor for what was going on in my life, in my head, the deep-down-under stuff. Characters like Dr Zaius, Howling Wind, and Ben the God Of Plants (I actually can't remember what that character's name was, it was the Int 1/Wis 5 character from Bleys's game with Gator, Finger and I as players) all revealed truths to me about the way that I was living my life which were jarring against my vision of my ideal self. Those characters caused me to make changes in my life, some subtle, others more obvious.
I would never have realized, looking at the stat sheet, that playing Dr Zaius would have brought me back into the fold of my religion. He was, after all, originally designed as a mockery of some of the most irritating social masks of the religious community that I grew up in. When designing him, I thought there was something rather poetic in hiding a murdering super-yakuza under those social graces. Yet, in playing the character, I came to realize that underneath his bumbling attempts to ask others to enlighten him, was a profound personal need to actually seek enlightenment in the real world, and the false assumptions I had about how sufficient my current efforts in pursuit of that goal was.
I actually created Ben The Plant God with the intention of seeking an epiphany. I remember explaining when I wrote him up that I always play talkative characters, and I wanted to try being someone who only said the important stuff. Man, he was a great character. When I just shut up for a second, I can really understand what's going on.
Howling Wind, since I've explained the others, kept explaining that, since he'd been forced to flee his tribe before his Coming of Age Ceremony, he had no right to participate in The Council Of Elders (eg, make decisions about what to do). Bleys completely re-wrote the script of my life when his character chided Howling Wind, "Maybe you should spend more time being a man, than wondering if you are one yet."
Heady words of wisdom, those proved to be.
I spent a lot of time this weekend trying to find the same sort of epiphany in the daydreams I've been having about running various campaigns. Trying to get Kenneth to tell me what the frequency is. I got so deep into it that I pretty much abandoned all of my social obligations for the weekend in favor of sitting in my room, listening to my own thoughts. I'll need to make some apologies once I've resurfaced fully.
Last year, I was obsessed with the idea of running a Traveller game. The idea was to run a game about a bunch of middle aged combat veterans, recently released back into the real world with no marketable skills (other than killing people) and a mortgage on a spaceship. I wanted to create a galactic empire on the verge of economic devastation due to their long running war efforts, and explore the effects of releasing a million war vets into a financial crisis. The empire would have an unemployment rate of nearly 15% before the release of all those soldiers (bringing them up to somewhere closer to 25%). Much of their production capacity was aimed at producing war machines, and the entire galaxy was running low on raw materials -- not enough metal to create new spaceships, etc. The game would have centered around Planet Detroit.
Recently, I wanted to run a Burning Empires game. This campaign concept was less well formed, and the only thing I really knew was that the political intricacies of world generation were what appealed to me so much. The premise of the entire game system really appealed to me. For those of you unfamiliar to the game, Burning Empires games are set in a crumbling galactic empire, and each player creates a character who is the head of a political faction. There are rules to develop really intricate internecine squabbling within a particular (player generated) planetary system. On top of this, there is an insidious alien threat which threatens to consume all of humanity unaware. The overarching question of the campaign then becomes: can you put aside your political differences to join against a common, unseen foe?
This last month, though, my interest has shifted to running an Ars Magica game. ArM is a troupe-style game set in Mythic (Feudal) Europe, with players creating primary characters who are long-lived wizards, and a supporting cast of the feudal fiefdom that supports them. During the game, you might switch between playing your magus, one of his soldiers, the scullery maid, the dragon trying to eat all of them, the wizard's monastic brother, or even one of your own political rivals.
In particular, I'm pretty attached to running a campaign set in the Iberian peninsula around 1220 AD, right at the end of the Reconquista era. The background of Christian/Islamic conflict, rising anti-Catholic attitudes and the growing Cathar upheaval would be a really lovely setting for a game about living, high born or low, in the Mythic Middle Ages. I spent the weekend reading the game log notes from the Prospectus Locus campaign, and really like the way the GM set up the campaign.
Most ArM games start with a bunch of neophyte mages who are given a set of ruins to claim as their own, with little outside interaction until the campaign starts. By contrast, Prospectus Locus starts in a covenant that was deeply embroiled in the Christian/Islamic conflict -- most of the covenant died while secretly supporting the Moors and the Almohad Empire. Every covenant in the region has taken a stance on the growing Christian efforts to retake the entire peninsula from Moors. In PL, the characters play neophyte mages who are drawn into the conflict during a desperate ploy by the "Roman" (eg Islamic-sympathetic) covenant to regain the political capital it lost when 80% of their magii died in a single battle.
The campaign goes on to throw in some really delightful complications in the form of Satanic influence and faerie upheaval which mimic the changes going on in the mundane world.
The PL campaign used 4th edition rules (and is over a decade old), and my online explorations have made note of the shifts that would come from upgrading to 5th edition. Even then, there are a few changes that I would make to the core ArM setting, and the campaign itself.
First, the world of Ars Magica, like so much of the role playing world, is focused way too heavily on Christianity. Instead of restricting faith-powers to Judeo-Christian institutions, and basically dismissing all the other religions as the misplaced faith of savages, like any good fan of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, I think it'd be more interesting to say that it is the faith that creates Dominion, and that the divine power comes from any widely-worshipped god, and keep the distinction between faith and magic coherent, even for non-Western religions. Norse mythology, for example, shows a clear distinction between their faith in the gods and, say, rune based magic. Possibly, I'd throw in some Reign The Conqueror, and create some Pythagorean Cultists in there, capable of strange, geometry based magics. In my world, a God that loses enough followers goes Fae or Magic, and a creature that gains enough worship becomes Divine. Although, admittedly, I doubt that would matter much to the campaign I'm talking about plagiarizing.
(Tangent: Plagiarize? Plague-ar-ize? What's the etymology of Plagiarize? Would Etymology make a good name for a child? Boy or girl?)
Of course, this might be covered in the Dominion sourcebooks, but the back cover only talks about the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god. So apparently, Dominion can only be the product of monotheism. Note that they do this while trying to say that all religions are equally valid. ~snort~ So gorram typical of Western writers.
~ahem~ Anyway....
Second, ArM 5th Edition seems to re-envision the political system of Order of Hermes (the default political affiliation of the game) from its original "12 House political system" into 4 major houses, 4 mystery cults, and 4 philosophical societies. The four major houses are based on historical association, and every member of them was apprenticed to someone who also came from that lineage. The mystery cults are each devoted to the exploration of a particular aspect of Hermetic Magic. The 4 philosophical societies are each devoted to a particular belief about how magicians should interact with the world, given their supernatural abilities.
The 5th edition doesn't go far enough, though. In my setting, I'd treat the 4 major house as the primary political factions of the Order. Everyone nominally belongs to one of these houses, much like most Americans are either Republican or Democrat. The mystery cults represent a potential additional political affiliation that one might choose -- You might be a Republican who is very interested in gun control laws. The philosophical societies represent a third vector of political affiliation. You might get the character creation bonuses of one group, but only because that was the most important influence on your character, or because your master beat those lessons into your head during your apprenticeship. The important idea, however it might hammer out, is to take the 12 houses, and divide them into four "compass points" of political virtue, so that you can end up with a character that is something like a Right-Wing Pro-Choice NRA Activist, or a Radical Left Wing Eco Terrorist Who Doesn't Care About Abortion At All.
This would exponentially increase the political conflict within the Order, and highlight something that is often overlooked by people when talking about Ars Magica: that it is a game about living the day to day lives of Mythic Europeans, not killing trolls. People get lost in the math and heavy bookkeeping of the game, tear their hair out trying to figure out exactly how many silver pennies you should pay for a rook of vis, but I think the true beauty of ArM is often lost in the math -- that this complexity helps to really highlight just how different the various character types are in terms of power, perspective and personal ambition. Not to mention, it helps make medieval history really accessible to math nerds.
Of course, I have serious doubts about whether or not I could even manage to run an ArM game, given my travel schedule and other vagaries of life. Then too, I just dumped off a bunch of social obligations precisely BECAUSE I'm way too busy these days, and not spending nearly enough time on income-producing efforts.
This, of course, is all ignoring whether I'd even find anybody who'd want to make a character for my game, and if I could actually figure out a way to harness the power of the internet to make it more feasible.
I suppose it is a bit like wanting to go shrooming, but your dealer only has acid on him. They're both trips down the rabbit hole, but they're still two different experiences. Sometimes, it doesn't matter how many shrooms you eat, you still crave a tab.
With several of the GMs back in Pittsburgh, our games frequently became a metaphor for what was going on in my life, in my head, the deep-down-under stuff. Characters like Dr Zaius, Howling Wind, and Ben the God Of Plants (I actually can't remember what that character's name was, it was the Int 1/Wis 5 character from Bleys's game with Gator, Finger and I as players) all revealed truths to me about the way that I was living my life which were jarring against my vision of my ideal self. Those characters caused me to make changes in my life, some subtle, others more obvious.
I would never have realized, looking at the stat sheet, that playing Dr Zaius would have brought me back into the fold of my religion. He was, after all, originally designed as a mockery of some of the most irritating social masks of the religious community that I grew up in. When designing him, I thought there was something rather poetic in hiding a murdering super-yakuza under those social graces. Yet, in playing the character, I came to realize that underneath his bumbling attempts to ask others to enlighten him, was a profound personal need to actually seek enlightenment in the real world, and the false assumptions I had about how sufficient my current efforts in pursuit of that goal was.
I actually created Ben The Plant God with the intention of seeking an epiphany. I remember explaining when I wrote him up that I always play talkative characters, and I wanted to try being someone who only said the important stuff. Man, he was a great character. When I just shut up for a second, I can really understand what's going on.
Howling Wind, since I've explained the others, kept explaining that, since he'd been forced to flee his tribe before his Coming of Age Ceremony, he had no right to participate in The Council Of Elders (eg, make decisions about what to do). Bleys completely re-wrote the script of my life when his character chided Howling Wind, "Maybe you should spend more time being a man, than wondering if you are one yet."
Heady words of wisdom, those proved to be.
I spent a lot of time this weekend trying to find the same sort of epiphany in the daydreams I've been having about running various campaigns. Trying to get Kenneth to tell me what the frequency is. I got so deep into it that I pretty much abandoned all of my social obligations for the weekend in favor of sitting in my room, listening to my own thoughts. I'll need to make some apologies once I've resurfaced fully.
Last year, I was obsessed with the idea of running a Traveller game. The idea was to run a game about a bunch of middle aged combat veterans, recently released back into the real world with no marketable skills (other than killing people) and a mortgage on a spaceship. I wanted to create a galactic empire on the verge of economic devastation due to their long running war efforts, and explore the effects of releasing a million war vets into a financial crisis. The empire would have an unemployment rate of nearly 15% before the release of all those soldiers (bringing them up to somewhere closer to 25%). Much of their production capacity was aimed at producing war machines, and the entire galaxy was running low on raw materials -- not enough metal to create new spaceships, etc. The game would have centered around Planet Detroit.
Recently, I wanted to run a Burning Empires game. This campaign concept was less well formed, and the only thing I really knew was that the political intricacies of world generation were what appealed to me so much. The premise of the entire game system really appealed to me. For those of you unfamiliar to the game, Burning Empires games are set in a crumbling galactic empire, and each player creates a character who is the head of a political faction. There are rules to develop really intricate internecine squabbling within a particular (player generated) planetary system. On top of this, there is an insidious alien threat which threatens to consume all of humanity unaware. The overarching question of the campaign then becomes: can you put aside your political differences to join against a common, unseen foe?
This last month, though, my interest has shifted to running an Ars Magica game. ArM is a troupe-style game set in Mythic (Feudal) Europe, with players creating primary characters who are long-lived wizards, and a supporting cast of the feudal fiefdom that supports them. During the game, you might switch between playing your magus, one of his soldiers, the scullery maid, the dragon trying to eat all of them, the wizard's monastic brother, or even one of your own political rivals.
In particular, I'm pretty attached to running a campaign set in the Iberian peninsula around 1220 AD, right at the end of the Reconquista era. The background of Christian/Islamic conflict, rising anti-Catholic attitudes and the growing Cathar upheaval would be a really lovely setting for a game about living, high born or low, in the Mythic Middle Ages. I spent the weekend reading the game log notes from the Prospectus Locus campaign, and really like the way the GM set up the campaign.
Most ArM games start with a bunch of neophyte mages who are given a set of ruins to claim as their own, with little outside interaction until the campaign starts. By contrast, Prospectus Locus starts in a covenant that was deeply embroiled in the Christian/Islamic conflict -- most of the covenant died while secretly supporting the Moors and the Almohad Empire. Every covenant in the region has taken a stance on the growing Christian efforts to retake the entire peninsula from Moors. In PL, the characters play neophyte mages who are drawn into the conflict during a desperate ploy by the "Roman" (eg Islamic-sympathetic) covenant to regain the political capital it lost when 80% of their magii died in a single battle.
The campaign goes on to throw in some really delightful complications in the form of Satanic influence and faerie upheaval which mimic the changes going on in the mundane world.
The PL campaign used 4th edition rules (and is over a decade old), and my online explorations have made note of the shifts that would come from upgrading to 5th edition. Even then, there are a few changes that I would make to the core ArM setting, and the campaign itself.
First, the world of Ars Magica, like so much of the role playing world, is focused way too heavily on Christianity. Instead of restricting faith-powers to Judeo-Christian institutions, and basically dismissing all the other religions as the misplaced faith of savages, like any good fan of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, I think it'd be more interesting to say that it is the faith that creates Dominion, and that the divine power comes from any widely-worshipped god, and keep the distinction between faith and magic coherent, even for non-Western religions. Norse mythology, for example, shows a clear distinction between their faith in the gods and, say, rune based magic. Possibly, I'd throw in some Reign The Conqueror, and create some Pythagorean Cultists in there, capable of strange, geometry based magics. In my world, a God that loses enough followers goes Fae or Magic, and a creature that gains enough worship becomes Divine. Although, admittedly, I doubt that would matter much to the campaign I'm talking about plagiarizing.
(Tangent: Plagiarize? Plague-ar-ize? What's the etymology of Plagiarize? Would Etymology make a good name for a child? Boy or girl?)
Of course, this might be covered in the Dominion sourcebooks, but the back cover only talks about the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god. So apparently, Dominion can only be the product of monotheism. Note that they do this while trying to say that all religions are equally valid. ~snort~ So gorram typical of Western writers.
~ahem~ Anyway....
Second, ArM 5th Edition seems to re-envision the political system of Order of Hermes (the default political affiliation of the game) from its original "12 House political system" into 4 major houses, 4 mystery cults, and 4 philosophical societies. The four major houses are based on historical association, and every member of them was apprenticed to someone who also came from that lineage. The mystery cults are each devoted to the exploration of a particular aspect of Hermetic Magic. The 4 philosophical societies are each devoted to a particular belief about how magicians should interact with the world, given their supernatural abilities.
The 5th edition doesn't go far enough, though. In my setting, I'd treat the 4 major house as the primary political factions of the Order. Everyone nominally belongs to one of these houses, much like most Americans are either Republican or Democrat. The mystery cults represent a potential additional political affiliation that one might choose -- You might be a Republican who is very interested in gun control laws. The philosophical societies represent a third vector of political affiliation. You might get the character creation bonuses of one group, but only because that was the most important influence on your character, or because your master beat those lessons into your head during your apprenticeship. The important idea, however it might hammer out, is to take the 12 houses, and divide them into four "compass points" of political virtue, so that you can end up with a character that is something like a Right-Wing Pro-Choice NRA Activist, or a Radical Left Wing Eco Terrorist Who Doesn't Care About Abortion At All.
This would exponentially increase the political conflict within the Order, and highlight something that is often overlooked by people when talking about Ars Magica: that it is a game about living the day to day lives of Mythic Europeans, not killing trolls. People get lost in the math and heavy bookkeeping of the game, tear their hair out trying to figure out exactly how many silver pennies you should pay for a rook of vis, but I think the true beauty of ArM is often lost in the math -- that this complexity helps to really highlight just how different the various character types are in terms of power, perspective and personal ambition. Not to mention, it helps make medieval history really accessible to math nerds.
Of course, I have serious doubts about whether or not I could even manage to run an ArM game, given my travel schedule and other vagaries of life. Then too, I just dumped off a bunch of social obligations precisely BECAUSE I'm way too busy these days, and not spending nearly enough time on income-producing efforts.
This, of course, is all ignoring whether I'd even find anybody who'd want to make a character for my game, and if I could actually figure out a way to harness the power of the internet to make it more feasible.
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Date: 26 Apr 2010 09:31 (UTC)