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.

A game of wits and wiles

Since Blood Sword was first released almost four decades ago, I wouldn't mind betting that plenty of GMs have used elements of the books in their roleplaying games -- the meteor stalker from book 2, to take just one example. Even so, it wasn't until Tambù's Blood Sword 5e and Prime Games' CRPG adaptation that the whole saga got converted into a detailed campaign.

Dungeons & Dragons is pretty much as good a choice of system as Dragon Warriors, given the relatively high-fantasy variant of Legend on display in Blood Sword. I recently heard from someone who is running a Blood Sword campaign and had to prepare the encounter with the elves from The Kingdom of Wyrd. (You can play through that sequence from the gamebook here and read an excerpt from the novelization here.)

In Blood Sword 5e the checkers game is handled by a series of Intelligence checks if the PCs play fair, and Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) or Charisma (Deception) checks against the elves' Wisdom (Perception) if the PCs try to cheat. The GM wanted to make it less abstract and thought that it might be worth playing it out at the table using chess, not draughts. But, he added: "One of the players is very good at chess and would have no difficulty beating me. So how do I set up a chess game that might reflect the in-game challenge of beating the elf lord? One possibility is that I nakedly cheat, moving pieces illegally until they figure out a workaround. But perhaps there's a better way."

Naturally I began by asking Claude:

The GM could et up an actual chess position, but every few moves, have the elf-king invoke 'ancient rules' that change the game:

• "Ah, but in the unseelie variant, bishops may leap once per game."
• "Did I not mention? When the moon is full, as it is tonight, pawns may move backwards."
• "Of course, in the endgame, my king gains the knight's move."

The players must figure out they need to either bind him to standard rules through a magical contract or else distract him from invoking new rules.

I liked that because it is potentially both funny and hair-pullingly frustrating for the players. It's also quite Vancean, as Claude seems to have realized from the dialogue samples it provided.

As an alternative human-created solution, and inspired by Amarillo Slim's trick for beating a tennis champ, I suggested ways to throw the chess whizz off his/her game. It made sense that the elf lord would propose a game using medieval chess rules, for example. More simply, given that the GM perhaps didn't have time to familiarize himself with a completely different set of rules, he could make it a game of cylindrical chess -- that is, any piece that moves off the left side of the board appears on the corresponding square on the right side, and vice versa. To make it more of a surprise, the elf lord wouldn't tell the player-characters that was the variant they were playing until the first time he needed to move a piece in that way.

Another option is to reflect the elf lord's illusions by having the PC play blind chess while the GM gets to see the whole board.

What did my correspondent do? After the game he reported back: "In the end I decided that the elf lord's cheating would be represented by brazenly illegal moves. The PCs confronted him when one of these moves placed two bishops on the white squares, a situation that obviously could never arise in normal play, and he conceded his queen in penance. As the game built to a climax, the character playing the chess game, who was a sorcerer, simply made his own shamelessly illegal move to deliver checkmate, and that felt dramatically right (the mortal sorcerer has his own tricks, after all) even if a bit more D&D than Legend."

I do like how the player picked up the improvisational aspect and ran with it, but if I were running the game myself I'd be dubious about interrupting the session with a full chess game, so it might be better to fast-forward to a classic endgame and play on from there. Or maybe you have a better idea -- in which case, let's hear it!

My sweet Claude

I'm a technophile through and through, but even I know that not everything that can be done should be done. Case in point: there's a service where you can order up a plot and characters and have a bespoke novel written and printed just for you.

(Hang on a tick, though. We'll be talking about AI here, and I can't be doing with the obligatory two minutes' hate of people telling me their tribal identity via a series of muddled anti-AI arguments, so take a look at the blog policy on that one, and if it's not to your taste then come back tomorrow.)

OK, so this customized novel service involves 'romantasy' books and the way it works is each reader specifies their required hero and heroine type, the degree of steaminess, whether the relationship should be bittersweet or rosy, and any necessary plot details. Then an AI writes the thing, the company prints a copy, and it's yours for a mere $89.

I have no doubt the results are as horrible as they are expensive. There is quite enough human-generated slop in publishing without pressing a button and having machines add infinitely more. The AI models get grammar and spelling right, and their prose style is marginally better than some bestselling authors, but they still shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the actual authorial process. For one thing, speaking as a writer, the words are the fun part. Why would I want anyone or anything else to do the writing for me?

I do use AI every day, though, in the tedious support tasks for which, if gamebooks and roleplaying games made any money, I'd hire an assistant. This month I'm making a push to complete my pet project, Jewelspider, a book which is now over two hundred pages long and three years late. I'm drawing on a host of primary sources, many of which are in Latin, French or Middle English. Finding all references to medieval lycanthropy, say, in a few dozen books like that could eat up weeks -- or I can get Gemini Notebook to help me and have those weeks free for writing instead.

In the middle of that, I'm still fielding the dozens of micro-tasks that would suck up time if I let them. A publisher needed me to give them a list of fifty scenes to illustrate in a couple of gamebooks I wrote  years ago. I'd have to re-read the books, find fifty key scenes, and collate all the text the artist will need across several sections. That's a few days of the most mind-numbing work... for a human. Claude read the books, found fifty different dramatic scenes, made sure to avoid spoiler scenes, and from my text pulled together a briefing for the artist for each illustration. I was able to check that list in an hour, make a few corrections, and it was good to go.

Then an app developer who is considering adapting another series of mine asked if I could provide them with a list of every item that can be picked up in the books, where they can be used, what they do, and where the player can lose them. That's a good month of work as the books were written decades ago and I don't still have the flowcharts. But Claude did the job in twenty minutes and gave me all the info in an Excel spreadsheet. It was two hundred items, incidentally. If I'd done that myself I'd still be working on it now.

Another app developer is producing an audio version of my gamebook Heart of Ice. Every few days they send me the scripts. That's dozens of pages to check, not only for dialogue but for the logic markup that drives the game. If I allowed myself to get pulled down that rabbit hole, Jewelspider would never get finished. So Claude took a look and came back with a list of the things I needed to take a closer look at -- dialogue given to the wrong character, inconsistent tagging, that kind of thing. Another couple of weeks saved. When the developer emailed to say they'd be recording the next day and the actors needed a pronunciation guide to all the items, names, places, etc, in the book, it could have meant me pulling an all-nighter. Claude took ten minutes to find all the words that might get mispronounced along with suggested alternative ways to say them, so all I had to do was tell Claude which were right and I got a list back with both a plain phonetic respelling and (for especially diligent thespians) an IPA version of each word.

The AI dealt efficiently with chores that once would have cost me time and energy, of which I nowadays have far less than I did in my youth, allowing me to focus on the creative part of my job: the actual writing. And if you're interested in Jewelspider (which is all-human work, both the writing and the art) please come over to Patreon and take a look.

Unmellow fruitfulness

Sweeter than honey from the rock,

Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,

Clearer than water flow’d that juice...

It's almost upon us. The start of autumn. My own gaming group like to mark the seasons with one-shots or mini-campaigns, and in that spirit here's a three-part roleplaying campaign based on Hope Mirrlees's 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist, which must have been written as a riposte to Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, published two years earlier, but whose most obvious inspirations are Christina Rossetti's poem Goblin Market and Aeschylus's The Eumenides.

Some historical background might help if you're not familiar with the story, which takes place in the fantasy republic of Dorimare, formerly a duchy with a strong lacing of fairy influence. Dorimare’s modern history is defined by a revolution that overthrew the hereditary dukes, the last of whom was Duke Aubrey, a "hunchback with a face of angelic beauty" who was a "laughing demon of destructiveness." His reign represented a synthesis of high art, wild romance, and sinister caprice.

The merchant class, seeking to remove barriers to trade (the "damming of the Dawl"), eradicated the nobility and the priesthood in a three-day battle. Post-revolution, the state established a strict taboo on all things "fairy." Fairy fruit, once a ritual offering for the Duke, was labeled a "loathsome and filthy vice."

The republic operates on a code of jurisprudence that uses "legal fictions" to manage reality. In the eyes of the law, Fairyland does not exist; consequently, the smuggling of fairy fruit is prosecuted under the fiction that the fruit is "woven silk."

Dorimare is bounded by the sea to the south and the Elfin Hills to the west. There are two rivers. The Dawl is the river of commerce, making Lud a city of wealthy merchants. The Dapple, however, has its source in Fairyland. It is a "humble little stream" that plays no part in commerce, yet an old maxim warns that "the Dapple flows into the Dawl."

The Elfin Marches are foothills that are considered fraught with physical and moral danger. In the two centuries since the overthrow of Duke Aubrey, no mortal is known to have crossed them and returned. But that's exactly what the player-characters may have to attempt.

Some readers have compared Lud to Rye in Sussex. I don't know if Hope Mirrlees was familiar with the town, but you could do worse than use its picturesque streets as a visual springboard, along with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy cover art by Gervasio Gallardo. More probably Mirrlees based Lud on Godalming, not far from where she lived at Shamley Green, in which case the fairy lands might correspond to Binscombe.

The game uses Powered by the Apocalypse rules and is structured in three acts involving investigation, adventure, and cunning. Players must be subtle, treading a fine line between truth and fiction. The campaign will end with their world fundamentally changed - but whether towards the exciting unpredictability of fairyland or the illusory stability of mortal laws is up to them.

I worked with Claude Opus 5 to design the game. Claude is very smart, but does have a laboured and unlovely prose style. Normally I wouldn't let an LLM get involved in actually writing the words, but for a free game created just for a blog post I've made an exception. If you play it, let us know how you get on in the comments. (If you habitually use the term "AI slop", feel free not to comment, and have a nice day.)

Blood Sword comes to the PC

This is the most exciting news all year for me, and the culmination of a dream. The first fully playable demo for Blood Sword CRPG is released today on Steam. The fact that it's by Victor Atanasov at Prime Games (who also created the Fabled Lands CRPG) told me all along that it would be brilliant. The only question is how brilliant, and now we can all judge that for ourselves.

Victor drew on both Blood Sword and Dragon Warriors for the tactical elements, but if you've been following his design masterclasses on Steam then you'll already know that there's a lot more to the PC version than that. Still, enough talk -- you can take up the quest for yourself. Will the machinations of the Magi bring about a poisoned future, or will your band of heroes successfully wield the Sword of Life to defeat them? Find out right here.

A whole other country

"It was anathema to her to shelter her head under a roof by a city hearth. Dear to the deities of Erebus, she dwelt in deserted tombs, and haunted the graves from which ghosts had been expelled.

"The gods grant every horror at the first cry of her voice, dreading a second incantation. Living spirits, still in control of their bodies, she buries in the grave; or reversing the rite she brings back the dead from the tomb, their corpses escaping to life. 

"She gathers the fragments of the funeral bier, and the fluttering grave-clothes turned to ash, and the cinders that reek of the corpse. And if the dead are sealed in a sarcophagus, that dries the internal moisture, absorbs the corruption of the marrow-bones, and stiffens the corpse, then she vents her anger eagerly on its limbs, thrusting her fingers deep in the eye-sockets, scooping out the solidified eyeballs in delight, gnawing the yellowed nails on withered hands. She mangles the hanged corpse, cuts the fatal noose with her teeth, scrapes at the crucified, tears at rain-beaten flesh and bones scorched by the sun. She steals nails that have pierced hands, the clotted gore and the black residues of putrefaction that oozed over all the limbs; and hangs her weight on sinews that resist her teeth.

"Often too, when a loved one is buried, the dreadful witch will hang over the body in kissing it, mutilates the head, opens the closed mouth with her teeth, bites the tip of the inert tongue in the dry mouth, infuses the cold lips with murmuring sound, and sends a wicked and arcane message down to the Stygian shades.

"Sextus Pompeius heard local tales of Erichtho, and made his way to her dwelling when night ruled the sky, at the hour in those deserted fields when the sun is in the zenith for those on the other side of earth..."

That chilling little passage is from Lucan's Pharsalia. You can read what happens when Sextus consults the witch here or here. I was put onto it by Paul Chrystal's book Miracula: Weird & Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece & Rome, essential reading for any roleplayer or writer with an interest in the odd customs of the past. 

The book comprises the most wonderfully abstruse collection of anecdotes, aphorisms, travel tales, superstitions, sexual practices, dining etiquette (especially important in the case of the Roman diplomat who describes going to dinner with Attila the Hun), parenting tips, ancient world science and medicine, conversation, humour, burial customs, and space travel -- and even in that list I've barely scratched the surface. The ancient curses alone (chapter 66) are worth the price of the book. I wholeheartedly recommend it.