Time lapse

"A Town Through Time" was the working title of a book project I developed with Russ Nicholson in the 1990s. I thought of it when my wife and I saw some 19th century maps of the part of London where we live. In the 1870s it was all fields. The only landmarks we recognized were the main road, some churches, and a coaching inn that is now our local pub. Thirty years later everything had changed. All the familiar roads were there and where there had been fields were now hundreds of houses.

What happened to so radically transform the outskirts of London? The underground railway, that's what. Overnight it made sense for people to live a few miles from the city centre and commute to work each day. To give you a sense of the difference: I used to work in Camden, a district in the north of London. To walk there from south-west London, where I live, would take two and a half hours. On the Tube it used to take me less than an hour door to door.

I was interested in how the landscape could show a changing world. We talked about each spread showing the same few roads, and each time you turned the page there'd be a new snapshot ten years on. So on one page there might be a carrot-topped kid doing a paper round. On the next spread we'd see a wounded soldier with red hair back from the Western Front, and we'd realize that was the boy grown up.

Here's how I described it in a letter to Russ:

I think the book should focus on a street in a southern English town, showing how it has changed over the period from the 1850 to the present day. The gimmick would be to show the street each decade, so the book could be called Ten Years On.

I've sketched a vague idea of how the street could look. This is an area which would have been parkland adjoining a major coaching route up until the mid-19th century. The original buildings were just the church, manor and coaching inn. As the suburbs grew, more buildings were put up. By the 1900s it is a suburban street with a fruit-&-veg shop at the end and the coaching inn has become the local pub. By the 1950s the manor will have been partially bombed and rebuilt as a school.

I'm going to do some research at the local library, which has a good historical reference section. I'll photocopy anything you might find useful. To sell the book, I think we'll need to do at least one spread, and I suggest the one set in the 1900s. Queen Victoria has died and people wear black armbands. In one of the houses a woman scolds her maid. Her husband is coming back from work in the city, tipping his top hat to the lady next door as he comes in his front gate. The son plays with a stick-and-hoop in the street. The cutaway of the house next door shows an upstairs room where a man lies sick in bed with a doctor listening to his breathing.

On the main road at the end of the street, people are coming and going on foot, horseback or penny farthing. The road is still more like a hard-packed earthen track than a modern tarmac surface, of course. A man could be driving a couple of pigs down the street, taking them to the common. (That actually happened in the area where we live when people first started to move into the newly-built houses in the 1890s. A banker was astonished to come out of his front door and see farmers with their animals coming up the road.)

All the spreads will show the street from the same angle, as if viewed from 45° above the ground. The cutaways will be X--ray vision views into the houses that can vary from spread to spread -- ie in some cases we might look into the attic of one house, the ground floor of the one next door, and in the following spread we might not look into either.

The idea will be to show the way lifestyles, fashions and the appearance of the street change over the years. Also to be a kind of 'soap opera' where you can see a man courting a girl down the street, married to her ten years on, their son playing, off to war ten years on... etc. Put in any amusing little visual stories you think of, as this is one of the aspects that the editors at Pan Macmillan liked. Call me once you've had a think about it. I think this project could be a real winner - one of those books that stays in print for thirty years.

The publishers liked the idea -- unsurprisingly, as picture books like that can sell to dozens of countries without the expense of a lot of translation. I don't know why we never went ahead with it. Maybe the publishers didn't like the sketch Russ did. Or maybe we got so busy on the Fabled Lands books that we forgot about this project.

I was reminded of it recently by the release of Robert Zemeckis's film Here, which uses a fixed camera and a series of time jumps to tell its stories. I obviously like the idea of telling a story with a fixed camera because I even dreamt about it twenty years after Russ and I first discussed Ten Years On. Maybe it's just the passage of time that fascinates me. Funny thing is, I told Russ this could be "one of those books that stays in print for thirty years". Well, it's been thirty years now, and while the book never made it into print, the concept has stayed with me just as long. 

The sound of the Heart

Think you know Heart of Ice? Guess again. Playnook Games have released the 30-year-old gamebook in brand new form as an audio game. Back in the days when Jamie and I worked at Eidos I used to bend the ear of anyone who'd listen about how audio adventure was a medium ripe for development. And lo, a mere quarter-century later, here it is. Check out the video above (or this one) for a promo code.

Wonderful things

One of my favourite books is Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds. The main character, Lizzie Greystock (later Lady Eustace) is one of fiction's standout characters a breathtakingly unabashed chancer, a kind of Victorian-era Donald Trump if Trump were quick-witted, beautiful, charismatic, young and female. It's not a spoiler if I reveal that Lizzie ends up with a diamond necklace, worth upwards of five million dollars in modern terms, that she claims her husband gave her as her personal property a few days after they were married and a few months before he died.

The concern of the Eustace family and their lawyer is that, if they can't prove the diamonds are an heirloom that should be held in trust for Lizzie's infant son, she'll sell them for cash. That means they'll be broken up and lose about half their value.

The fun of the novel lies in the increasingly chaotic repercussions that ripple out from Lizzie's lies to affect everyone around her, but it also got me thinking of how much value must have been lost in the course of plunder through the ages. Conquistadors seized Aztec treasures and melted them down for shipping home to Spain. At the time they only cared about the gold, but to us today those artifacts would be of immeasurably greater value if they could be restored. It's in the artistry and the history where the value lies.

In traditional dungeon bashes, adventurers rush into ancient buried temples, prise jewelled eyes out of idols, break gold statues up for easier carrying, and load their mules with bags full of ancient coins that will be sold for smelting, not to adorn a numismatist's collection. Imagine Howard Carter had done that to Tutankhamun's treasures. The value in gold ingots would only be in the tens of millions, but as a complete set of 18th Dynasty artifacts they've been insured for one billion dollars.

Heists are popular in roleplaying these days, it seems. If the player-characters steal treasure from a private collection, they may not be able to sell the items at their true value. Crown jewels, for example, can't easily find a buyer. In that case there may be no choice but to break the jewels up and melt down the precious metals. The loot may thereby lose 90% of its value, but the difference is that the remaining 10% now goes to the thieves, so what do they care about the vandalism involved?

For treasure to be worth anything as art, you need to have a society in which aesthetics feature as well as commerce. In Tekumel gaming, for example, coins bearing the head of Queen Nayari, founder of the Bednalljan dynasty, would be worth far more intact than if melted down into silver or gold ingots -- in theory, that is, though first you'd have to find a wealthy numismatist to buy the coins. In contrast, D&D was styled more on the Wild West, where one sack of loot was much the same as another.

Does treasure play a role in any of your games, and if so is it in the form of mere plunder or artworks of unique value?

Casket treasures

I don't have words enough to properly praise Casket of Fays and all the other fine Red Ruin publications. Red Ruin Publishing itself is the brainchild of Simon Barns, tireless champion of Dragon Warriors and Legend generally. Andrew Girdwood at Geek Native has just published this interview with Simon with lots of tantalizing glimpses at what Red Ruin has in the pipeline.

Come back tomorrow for more about treasure and the part it plays in roleplaying games.

"The Best Laid Plans" (a RuneQuest tactical battle scenario for Questworld)

This was a scenario I wrote in 1983 to accompany a boxed set of metal miniatures that were based on the lesser demons from my "Dealing with Demons" series of articles in White Dwarf. The articles and the scenario used RuneQuest 2 rules. When Lee Barklam put "The Best Laid Plans" on the Cobwebbed Forest site (a storehouse of fabulous treasures, by the way; go take a look), he converted it to Dragon Warriors, but just in case you're an obsessive completist like me, here is the RQ version too.

A SPECIAL RUNEQUEST SCENARIO

SETTING UP

This adventure is really intended to give players a crash course in how to deal with the Questworld demons. It should be fairly light-hearted, but that doesn't mean that survival chances are high. Players are recommended to roll up special characters for this adventure only, unless they particularly want to use suitable regular characters.

Characters generated for the adventure will have two skills at 55% including natural bonuses, two at 45% including natural bonuses, three at 40% including natural bonuses, and three at 30% plus natural bonuses. They can be any skills the player wants. All characters with POW below 14 get it increased to 14. Characters can trade POW for one-use Rune spells if they wish. Each character also has 6000L to spend on spells and equipment.

Basically, the scenario involves N characters in a fight with N+2 demons. If there are fewer than four players in the group, each should take two characters, If there is a surplus of players, get some of them to help run the demons.

PLAYERS’ INTRO

You are seasoned adventurers who have come from all over the known world (i.e. the mapped territories of Theelar) to the Tower Built of Night, having heard that the great demonologist Master Hajpool the Supreme is hiring men at very good rates of pay. You stand in one of the chambers of the Tower and listen to Master Hajpool explain the deal:

“Attend, and I will simplify matters for your meagre intellects to comprehend. Tonight I summon the Lord Kastyrion, overseer of Gambits, Demon of Risk. Not in five centuries has terrible Kastyrion been evoked, for he is mightily feared, having extraordinary power and a predisposition to summarily slay any summoner who does not please him greatly. But I have determined that, since Kastyrion above all things values a gamble, by the very act of summoning him I take considerable risk and thus ensure his goodwill towards me. So the ‘gamble’ is really a dead certainty.” Hajpool titters slightly, a curious sound from one so powerful. He continues, “When he appears he will doubtless expect same sort of competition with me. | intend to suggest pitting you against some enchanted beasts of Kastyrion's, and then the demon-lord and I can bet on the outcome. You needn't worry too much about the danger, because the battle will have to be evenly matched or even slightly in your favour to gratify Kastyrion’s desire to gamble. Payment will be 8000L each plus a free healing 6 for any— I mean everyone who survives. All of you who are interested, come to the topmost chamber before midnight tonight.”

So it is that you find yourself standing armed and armoured in a chamber at the top of the Tower Built of Night, shivering against the wind howling through the open windows and watching Master Hajpool as he waits for the light of the full moon to throw the proper patterns on the stone floor. It’s alarming that you should be outside the pentacle he's drawn for himself, but perhaps that's the proper summoning etiquette?

Hajpool begins his gestures and intonations as the moment arrives. Much of the ritual seems dubious or even totally comical, and as the minutes drag on you find it more and more difficult to accept that anything is going to happen. Then, quite suddenly, Hajpool claps his hands together and stands perfectly still. The lines of the pentacle brighten with a reddish glow. The wind drops momentarily and then starts to build up, rapidly becoming an icy gale which screeches through the chamber like a thing alive. Hajpool starts to smile, then throws open two chests beside him. One is full of blood and the other is full of gold dust. The contents of each chest seems to stir and then rise up, mingling and forming a single scarlet and-gold stream, a flux which passes out through the window and up towards the stars.

Hajpool watches the offerings from the chests flow to the demon-lord's realms for a few moments, Something seems to distract him , because he swallows hard a couple of times, then cranes his back and gingerly fingers his throat. A moment later his head explodes, scattering an unmentionable gore over the ceiling of the chamber.

There follows a moment of preternatural calm. Hands seem to reach almost lazily for sword hilts. Each of you watches the demonologist’s headless form begin to crumple within the pentacle. Then, with a noise like a dozen thunderclaps, the topmost chamber of the impregnable Tower Built of Night bursts apart.

A moment of complete disorientation. You feel the rushing wind and realise you are falling. Not far off, the thread of blood and gold flows up into the crystal night. Then you see the lights of Deliverance far below, and the moonlight shimmering on the Issaries river, and with sudden panic you realise that you are now thousands of feet above the ground, plummeting to your doom.

Each of you hears a voice in your mind, a voice like the rustling of leaves in the breeze: “Unlucky Hajpool. I despise someone who tries to fix the odds. Now, through your greed, you miserable creatures have come into my clutches and it seems I must get my entertainment from you.”

You fall into a light cloud, and for a moment the ground rushing up to meet you is obscured. As the veil of cloud parts, you are aware that you are falling much slower now. You land with a jarring thud on a floor of polished black marble. You are in a large, vaulted chamber. It seems to be about thirty metres across, and each of you is lying in one of the alcoves around the wall.

Kastyrion’s challenge echoes around the room: “Welcome to my combat arena. Thirty of your seconds from now I shall introduce you to my gladiators, who will seek to slay you. If any of you are still alive after one hour, I will return them to your own plane. Remuneration is also offered, for the survivors to divide amongst themselves: a magical crystal for each gladiator slain.” As you step from your alcoves, a reddish glow appears within each. “These alcoves fare havens from the battle to come. You will find that they protect you from my gladiators if you need to retire for healing purposes. Be warned that the protective energies are of strictly limited duration.”

REFEREE’S NOTES

The procedure for this arena combat follows Michael Cule's classic “Rumble at the Tin Inn” in White Dwarf #35. (Go listen to Michael and Roger Bell-West on the Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice podcast every month.)

1. Each hex equals 1 metre. Every three hexes (or part of three) moved through costs one Strike Rank. A shift in facing by one or two hex-sides is equivalent to one metre's movement for purposes of determining SR.

2. During each Melee Round the four phases laid out in Runequest should be strictly and systematically adhered to. Characters make their Statements of Intent in inverse order of DEX and then conduct Movement of Non-Engaged Characters in order of DEX. A list of all the characters (including demons) in order of DEX will therefore be useful.

3. Back-steps cost the character one SR.

4. Each alcove contains red glow – a force field which activates whenever a character steps into the alcove, preventing anyone else from entering that alcove until the first character leaves It. After each alcove has been occupied for a total of four MR during the scenario its force field ceases to function, so keep track of how often each alcove is used. Demons cannot enter alcoves. Missiles cannot be shot into or out of an active (occupied) alcove, although spells can.

5. The natural lighting in the room is equivalent to twilight. There are three large iron braziers in the room. Once ignited (they are unlit at the start) these will burn for the duration of the scenario. To the left of each alcove there is a lit torch in a bracket. The braziers are immovable, but the torches can be taken down and carried.

6. The pool in the centre of the room is one metre deep. The water detects as strongly magical. A character standing in the pool will be at a height disadvantage if meleed by someone standing at the pool's edge, so their attacks will be at −10% and attacks made on them will be at +10%. However, the pool's magic protects them as long as they stand in it: they get +2 points of armour protection, +05% chance of resisting spells, and are not subject to critical hits. Demons can enter the pool if they wish; they are aware of its properties.

7. A group of N characters will be pitted against N demons plus the two gremlins. The demons involved are chosen by the referee. Lord Kastyrion stops the combat after 60 minutes (300 MR). Any character alive at that time will be returned to Questworld, materialising on the lawn beside Hajpool's tower just as the sun rises. The promised crystals(selected at random) lie on the ebony tables beside them.

THE DEMONS' STRATEGY

The demons will co-operate with one another as much as possible, but since they do not speak each other's languages there will not be much in the way of a coherent battle plan. One demon's healing spell will not work on another demon if they are of different species. Gremlin 1 can and will use his xenohealing on any of the demons that seem to need it. Gremlin 2 will cast his concealment on either the storm demon or the nightmare, and other demons might follow his lead and cast their defensive spells an one another.

The other point to remember is that the demons are unlikely to settle for convenient one-on-one melee. A character fighting the sraim could find in the next instant that they’ve been hit by a lightning bolt from the storm demon meleeing someone else and that the rult is teleporting in beside them to deliver a couple of claw attacks.

Special notes on the demons

B’krath: Within 2 hexes of a lit brazier, the b’krath’s Defence will be down to 25%. It will of course avoid such a situation if at all possible.

Porphyr: Torches could be used as clubs against the porphyr, the advantage being that any damage it takes from the fire cannot be regenerated in this combat. Any time the porphyr is struck by a burning torch its flowing robes might catch fire (roll POWx5 of less to avoid this) and it then takes 1d2 damage per MR until the fire is out. To put the fire out, the porphyr must disengage and then roll DEXx5 or less; this roll is attempted each MR until successful. Death Rune cultists may have other attacks to use against the porphyr.

Stalker: The stalker can make itself intangible to anything except metals and magical materials, but it is unlikely to find this power very useful during the combat because the arena walls and floor are magical. When the stalker wounds a character it makes a POW vs POW attack with a view to draining the character's STR by 2. Every fifth round it can hurl white energy bolts (85% accuracy; SR3; 1d20 damage; 10 hexes range).

Pazuru: Remember that a pazuzu can fly, cast image creation for no cost, and is immune to one-point battle magic. It can breathe flame up to 10 hexes.

Rult: The rult’s breath vapour has a range of 1 hex. Damage done by the vapour cannot be healed magically. When in a hex adjacent to a character, the rult has the power to teleport to any hex adjacent to any other character it has previously meleed, so keep track of who the rult fights.

Amorph: The amorph will stay towards the middle of the room if possible, so as to take on anyone who tries to make use of the pool.

Nightmare: The nightmare would actually be dispelled by the Yelmalio cult spelt sunbright, if anyone has it. When this demon wounds a character it makes an immediate POW vs POW attack which will discorporate the character if successful. The character's spirit remains active until the body ls killed (which the nightmare will try to do straight away).

Sraim: The sraim can spit its acidic venom up to 10 hexes. The venom does 5 points damage to the location it touches; armour will protect until eaten away. Remember to add the venom damage if the sraim bites an opponent. It usually prefers to stand off from melee and spit, however.

Storm Demon: The storm demon can hurl lightning up to 20 hexes. A victim takes four 1d8 wounds from the lightning, with armour providing only half normal protection. It prefers to grapple for heatshock (like a fire elemental). It will not cross the copper rods fencing off the north part of the room as to do so would cost it 4d6 hit points. Lightning bolts discharged across the rods are halved in accuracy.

Gremlins: Gremlins have 85% camouflage. Once successfully camouflaged they don't have to reroll unless they move. Anyone within 8 hexes of a gremlin suffers bad luck in the form of a 5%-15% penalty (1d3x5%) to all rolls. This power applies to the other demons as well, so the gremlins will try to manoeuvre so as to bring bad luck only on the players; non-engaged spellcasters or missile-users are especially likely targets. Gremlins’ power is not cumulative, so the two together don't cause twice as much bad luck. Gremlins are immune to the bad luck power.

Flintlocks and flashbacks

I’ve often – too often, you may think -- talked about how pointless it is to try to shape games to resemble stories. Stories are the chewed cud that’s fed to us as easy-to-digest entertainment. Life is messier, full of tangled strands that look like bits of stories but may go nowhere, or veer off into something else entirely. I find that goal a more interesting one, making a second life out of roleplaying. If there are stories to be told, those can happen when the players and/or the characters sit down and reminisce. Again, just like in life. I prefer the lily without any gilding, especially if the petals are turning brown.

Still, there’s only so long you can keep banging the same drum. And my sad devotion to the ancient religion of freeform roleplaying has not found favour with either the players around the table or readers of my latest gamebooks. As Raphael van Lierop, creative director of The Long Dark, says: ‘Open-world gameplay is the enemy of narrative tension, so sometimes you have to take a bit of a heavier-handed approach to create that tension, that drama.’

If players are waiting for you to bait the hook and reel them in on a story, it’s no use expecting them to land themselves. So I got to thinking how to move beyond rejecting stories outright. Could I move beyond the Story Transcended and be back In the World – at the table, that is – with a Zen approach to narrative?

That’s one brane. It was on a collision course with another, which was how to boot up a new Legend campaign for my players without cranking time back a few years. Those endless End Times could get a bit wearing, and we’d already had Doomsday happen twice. What could come after?

Paul Mason and I once thought of running a two-part Robin Hood campaign. Each part would cover the same events, but in the first one we’d aim for mythic high adventure (the Errol Flynn approach, with cinematic rules and stonkingly powerful characters). Then a year or two later we’d go over the same ground only much more low-key, with mud and damp bowstrings; the Robin & Marian version. (You could do it the other way round too, but my inclination is always towards the minor key.)

My new Legend campaign idea was to have the characters located in Ellesland, which is a region corresponding roughly to 11th to 13th century Britain, but this would be a version of Ellesland resembling our 17th century. Twenty years earlier, in their youth, the characters had been involved in a bitter civil war that still left scars on society. The players were separately asked which side they had supported, the revolutionaries or the crown (think Wat Tyler v King Richard). After an interregnum the king had been restored and now we were in a period of truth and reconciliation – in theory.

The point of the game being to play tricks with memory, I had the war years styled more like the early medieval world of traditional Legend. If a character turned their mind to how twenty years had wrought such changes in society and technology (no sign of pistols or muskets back in the war, for example) they’d find the details hazy. Something more earth-shattering than victory or defeat had happened – because, after all, the loss of your twenty-year-old self is an apocalypse. That’s how I characterized Doomsday in this game.

None of the war years had yet been played out. The campaign would begin in the present (that is, several years after the war ended) and from time to time there would be flashbacks to twenty years earlier. The modern sequences would use regular rules and dice-rolling and conform to my nonconformist views about narrative. The flashbacks would freely make use of ‘story flourishes’ that the players could indulge just like one of those newfangled writers-room games, with moves like:

• Little Did We Know
• Luckily... (ie a coincidence)
• But That's Not How It Happened

Those story flourishes, or moves, are earned in the present-day parts of the game. If you don't have a flourish to spend to avoid injury/death/catastrophe in the flashback, it affects you in the present.

A limit on the flashback system is that most flourishes can't introduce an entirely new element to the story, such as a new major NPC or a world-changing event. The exception is the flourish called Out Of The Blue. As ever in improv, blocking should be hard, meaning But That’s Not How It Happened might be costly – but probably wouldn’t need to be, as players will want to save it to avoid death or crippling injury rather than simply avoiding an inconvenient plot twist.

In extreme cases, you’d have a points tot-up. For example, a player says, ‘That’s when the army turned up to save us.’ Was it the whole army? Really? Perhaps the points say no, just a platoon. Other players could chip in with their own story flourishes, so that if the whole group agree then those bigger story changes become more achievable.

When not driving the narrative by means of story flourishes, characters in the flashbacks use a simpler system for procedural stuff based on the four humours. They don’t use their modern-day stats. Modern day is more procedurally emergent, less of a shaped narrative -- like a soap opera, though hopefully more Sopranos than Neighbours.

There is magic in the present day. You can have ritual magic (very hard) and/or alchemy. In general, both take a while to do so there's none of the old fireball-type sorcery you might encounter in the flashbacks. Alchemy differs from sorcery in that it tends to have lasting effects (potions of love, transformation, healing are permanent) whereas ritual magic usually just tweaks reality for a short time. Magic is not like science. The same actions don’t always produce the same results, and every problem is different. You raised a fog before? Ah, but that was a Tuesday and your birth stars were in the ascendant then.

I also considered that at some point it’s possible that magic could actually take the players back in time, in which case there are no story flourishes for them to use -- it's now happening for real, not in memory, so the regular present-day rules system applies. I admit the irony of planning a story development in the supposedly freeform part of the campaign, but if you’re going to run a campaign on two tracks like this then a point where the two approaches collide is pretty much de rigueur.

I never got to try this campaign out. It might not have worked, and my Legend players never really bought into the shapeless unease of emergent narrative in any case. So it became one of three campaigns (along with The Frankenstein Wars and The Yellow King) that didn’t garner enough interest to get going. And there’s probably a lesson in that, if I would but learn it.

This is a repost of one of the non-paywalled articles from my Patreon page.

Play to find out

I don't know what Blorb stands for (if anything) but it's the name of a set of refereeing principles for roleplaying that you can read here. The essence of the thing is not to prepare a plot but just to define NPCs' stats and motivations and events that will happen unless the player-characters do something, and then let the story emerge in play. You know, the way life works.

In a nutshell:

• Blorb is a preparation-focused playstyle, and prep is central, but never prepare plot.
• Do prepare entities. Places, enemies, friends, items, rewards. 
• What happens should be emergent, not prewritten. Events should be things that might happen (from mechanics, dice rolls etc), not always will happen, or, worse, that the DM could decide to have happen.

If you like concepts like act breaks, character arcs, flashbacks, plot twists, and all that Save the Cat/TV Tropes palaver then Blorb is not for you. And I would add that if you do like all that stuff then you should be writing a novel or screenplay instead of running a roleplaying game, because you're missing 90% of what makes roleplaying a unique medium.

The ever-excellent Good Friends of Jackson Elias have a inspiring episode about reactive off-the-cuff GMing right here. I particularly like the description of a roleplaying scenario as "the negative space of a story" -- not that the best campaigns need anything you could call scenarios, mind. Anyway, come back tomorrow for a look at one way to weave stories out of games.