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.
