Manners maketh man

“It was their pity Driss hated. They seemed not to be aware that he could destroy them at any moment he chose. Destroy them and loot the little safe in their office, where they kept all their earnings from the bed and breakfast. They were not even aware of the compassion he was showing them. They looked right past his manhood and ignored it, as if it didn't exist and he was just a child who needed a bowl of milk every day.”

In Lawrence Osborne’s novel The Forgiven, an impoverished Moroccan named Driss illegally makes his way to Spain and is given a job by Roger and Angela Bloodworth. The Bloodworths shelter Driss from the authorities but they don’t appreciate that their liberal culture is not universal. The openness and trust they show to Driss, he takes as an affront to his masculinity. Wary hospitality according to a strict code would be fine. It’s the casual assumption that he can be treated as a member of their household that he finds disrespectful.

You don’t get much culture in fantasy. Oh, occasionally somebody will say, “It’s our custom to wear only green velvet coats on holy days,” but that’s barely skin-deep, a merely satirical look at the arbitrary nature of human customs. From the inside customs don’t feel funny, they feel like a matter of life and death. A Bedouin is obliged to offer hospitality. A samurai must atone for shame with seppuku. A calling card with “somdomite” written on it can destroy a reputation.

When roleplaying is set in a world with its own social structures and mores, and players are trying to get inside that mindset rather than play 21st century characters parachuted into a superficially exotic environment, then what you are doing is culture gaming.

Here’s an example of culture gaming from a convention game run by Michael Cule. There were a bunch of players who were new to Tekumel, and they were barbarians who’d arrived fresh off the boat in Jakalla harbour. Vortumoi, a priest of Hrü’ü played by me, brought them to be interviewed by his clan uncle, Lord Vrimeshtu, who wanted to hire them for an expedition. Also present was my bodyguard, Karunaz, played by Paul Mason. We sat on cushions to discuss the expedition over a meal – a real feast of Thai snacks that Michael brought along! – and Karunaz remained standing off to one side. (He’s Livyani, so never ate with Tsolyani, and in any case it was not his position to sit with his employer.) The tricky moment arose when Lord Vrimeshtu pointed to the wine and said, "Get your Livyani to pour for us, Vortumoi." Well, Karunaz was low clan but he was nonetheless a warrior, and you don't expect a bodyguard to serve you at table like a menial. What to do? Then I had it: “Allow me, uncle,” and I got up and served the wine myself. I could do that without loss of face because I was doing my uncle’s bidding rather than doing a favour for the barbarians. Thus my honour and Karunaz's were preserved and the clan head's wishes were fulfilled.

Whether you think that kind of thing is the lifeblood of a roleplaying game or a distraction from the main business of the adventure will tell you if you’re a culture gamer or not. It’s really the old (and often slightly forced) dichotomy between character-based and plot-based fiction. I lean towards character-based myself, much preferring Anton Chekhov to Robert Harris – though my bookshelves have room for both. And you do need both. If you think of the characters as heading towards a light, which stands for the plot objective, and the medium they’re moving through is their society, it’s the turbulence in the medium that makes the journey unique. Without it you’ve just got a straight line. But if there’s no light then they go around in circles or do nothing. 

(Examples of stories that are powered by events but flavoured by social constructs: Julian Fellowes' Belgravia, Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and Francis Spufford's Golden Hill. Or any truly compelling narrative, really.)

So the plot isn’t just a MacGuffin. Still, I don’t actually remember the adventure from that session. I think it involved a ruined fortress in a swamp. Probably there were monsters to fight. The barbarians will have run about and hit things, but it’s the nail-biting nicety of that dining-room etiquette problem that has stayed with me.

So do we need rules for social interaction? Obviously there are rules – we live our real lives according to such rules, usually unspoken but very well understood. We are alert to nuances of manner in our own society, even if we couldn’t actually sit down and explain the rules of conduct to a foreigner. But do we need game mechanics - do we need that kind of rule?

I don’t think so. We use game mechanics for the “stage directions” of a game. “I climb the wall stealthily and the guards don’t hear me.” Do you? And do they? We’ve got dice for that.

But social behaviour happens in the dialogue. Players can handle it perfectly well in conversation and mechanics couldn’t cover all the permutations anyway. Often a dispute in social terms comes down to very fine distinctions, and it’s possible that neither party is wholly right or wrong. If you wanted game-mechanical rules for social interactions, in order to cover every outcome they’d need to be highly abstract. Something like this:

“I seek to impose my status on you, rolling 6.”
“I roll a 3 and resist the attempt, countering with a critical social roll.”
“Now let’s decide what our characters actually said.”

Some people like to play that way, but I prefer immersion. Fortunately all you need is a sense of what the society’s rules are in common situations and in general principle, and a willingness on the players’ part to throw themselves into that. For example, Tsolyani law treats injury or death as a civil crime which can be settled by means of shamtla (weregild). Once you know that and the form for demanding shamtla or for taking the case to a duel, you get a lot of emergent possibilities.

Then when you include the fact that in Tsolyanu insults are also regarded as an injury, your social outcomes explode into Mandelbrot-set level richness. Your players might even forget there’s a monster-stuffed ruin out in the marshlands, because the cut and thrust of society is much more real and involving. Instead of Dungeons & Dragons, you’re in the territory of Sense & Sensibility – and, speaking as a culture gamer, that makes for much more memorable games.

Here's some reading and viewing to kick off ideas about how people act within the framework of a social setting:

• Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology by Peoples & Bailey
• Legal Systems Very Different from Ours by Friedman, Leeson & Skarbek
• Ridicule (1996) directed by Patrice Leconte
• Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen
• Social Engineering by William H Stoddard

By the way, although Tekumel is an ideal setting for culture games, I don't want to give the impression that it can only be played that way. Professor Barker said that everyone should create their own Tekumel, and I'm sure most campaigns are very far from the "real" Tekumel. An example: in the Five Empires, belonging to a legion, especially in the heavy infantry, is a respected profession. In the most prestigious legions you'd need to be high-medium status even to sign up, and even "sergeants" (hereksa, commander of 100 legionaries) are mainly from aristocratic clans. Promotion is affected by your social class, manners, bravery and even looks as much as by your competence. That's the culture gaming version. Many Tekumel campaigns, however, treat soldiers as usually uneducated and poor, because that's what players in modern Western societies expect. Personally I can't see in that case why they wouldn't play D&D or something similar instead, but everyone should choose whichever style gives them the most fun.

How to roleplay

Paul Mason is famous in roleplaying circles as one of the uber-fans involved with Dragonlords and as the editor of the superb if infrequent imazine, in which he treated us to a stellar series of articles and reviews in his inimitably trenchant and thought-provoking style. He was also for many years one of my Tekumel players and has written Outlaws, a great but so far unpublished RPG of the heroes of Liangshan Po, which I used as the basis of my (also unpublished) Heian Japan roleplaying game, Kwaidan.

These days Paul is too busy with his academic career in Japan to do much roleplaying, but the last time he was over in Britain I asked if he wouldn’t mind me running some of his articles as guest posts, and he gave a kind of oblique permission. That is, he looked at me with an expression that was more 'are you serious?' than 'don’t you dare'.

This piece might strike you as very basic stuff if you’re a roleplayer – but hey, I’ve been roleplaying since the mid-70s and I found it useful. Remember that once you reach 10th Dan you go back to wearing a white belt. Nobody should ever think they’re anything but a novice. Take it away, Paul...


In a role-playing game the rules are details: they are the trees from which part of the wood is composed. So let’s consider a different approach to writing rules for role-playing games. Let’s try to look at the wood.

goal
The purpose of this game is to take part in a story. The story isn’t told by anyone, but is built up from the improvised contributions of all the participants. See the sample for an idea of how this works.

how to play
The game creates a story. Participants in the game all play a part in creating the story, by making contributions. The goal of the game is to make it as easy as possible for participants to act or describe their improvised contributions to the game without spoiling the sense of immersion.

participants
There are two basic types of participants in the game. Players are a little like actors. They will usually act the life of a single person: their character. The referee is more like a director. The referee describes sensory information in the story, and may occasionally act other characters in the story, as needed.

action
A participant who contributes to the game by acting does so by saying what their character is trying to do. So in the sample, Fred says: ‘I climb up the gantry to the deck above.’ If you like, when this action is speech, the participant can act the speech by actually speaking as the character. So later in the sample, when Fred says ‘Set it to stun!’ he’s actually saying what his character is saying. In some cases you might need to check which it is, but usually it will be obvious. Two or more participants can thus act the roles of their characters, conducting a conversation which forms part of the story.

Anything which is acted by a participant takes place as described, unless it is challenged by another participant (usually this is the job of the referee, but other players may also challenge if they like). A participant whose action has been challenged must prove that the character could succeed. To do this, they need to use an agreed game mechanic (such as Outlaws Light, presented in imazine #33). An example of a game mechanic is that you must roll 9 or less on two dice to hit with your phaser. Really skilled characters like Worf need an 11 or less. Other Klingons need 7 or less.

Some complex interactions, such as fights, often involve continual implied challenges, and therefore may require a lot of use of mechanics. Other actions, if they seem reasonable given the character and the story, can pass unchallenged.

description
A participant who contributes to the game by describing does so by talking about something accessible to the senses of characters in the game. This is usually the job of the referee, but players may also occasionally describe things connected with their characters. So in the sample, Sam describes what the players can see once they have climbed the gantry, and what they can feel.

Descriptions, like actions, can be challenged. They shouldn’t be contradicted outright, but senses can be mistaken! A player who describes a scene is speaking only for their character, and other players, or the referee, may perceive things differently. Note that the referee is privileged in description: because they speak for ‘everybody’ a player who challenges a referee’s description is simply describing what their own character perceives, and not what anyone else does.

Obviously, not everything needs to be described, and referees should beware of trying to act events in the story in the guise of description! For example, if Sam in the sample goes on to say ‘When you walk on to the transporter pad, there is an explosion’ this is wrong, because the players haven’t yet said that they are acting by walking on to the transporter pad. Remember, you’re not telling a story by crafting it authorially, you’re creating one by inhabiting it.

contributing
There are no fixed rules governing how and when you can contribute to a story, but there are some obvious guidelines that should be followed. The most important is: take your cues from the story. If you act something your character is doing tomorrow, then everyone else’s actions today will have to be done in flashbacks. This will be difficult, and may even cause a contradiction with what you acted about tomorrow. Challenging other player characters, or getting into conflicts with them, is fine, but blocking the story itself is generally bad form.

A typical sequence of contributions will be:

• Referee describes the situation facing the player characters, and/or uses a character to act a stimulus.
• Players respond by acting their character’s reaction. There’s no fixed order to this, but if a player feels that their character should be able to act first, they always have recourse to a challenge.
• Participants respond to the actions. This may lead to further description—the referee, or a player, may describe the result of actions.
• Out of all these contributions, a sequence of events will soon be evident. This is the story.

Even in your own mind, separate Action from Description. At first it’s tempting to think that your character could do absolutely anything, but soon you find that the limitations are what create drama. Maybe you can’t leap that chasm, maybe you’re not fast enough to outrun the fireball. Maybe the Ferengi saw you pick his pocket. Sometimes you should challenge yourself, not wait for other players to do it.

timing
Time for the characters in the story does not pass at the same rate as it does for the players. At times, it will pass very slowly, if you’re working out something that doesn’t take long, but needs to be explained in detail. At other times, it will pass very quickly, as with a long journey in which nothing much happens. As with most things in the game, time can be skipped over, subject to challenge by any of the other participants.

winning
There are no rules to cover winning. Players can decide on their own ideas of what constitutes winning. However, they may find that other players don’t agree with them. So how do you win? Well, how does a character win in a story?

ending
The game takes place in game sessions. A game session is when the participants get together to play the game. It can end at any time that is convenient for the participants. The end of a game session doesn’t mean the end of a story. The story can continue in the next session. A story only ends when everyone agrees that it’s finished, and you start a new one, or when you stop playing the game entirely!

postscript
Thanks to Dave Morris for providing comments and useful examples based on Star Trek. In writing this, I’ve been particularly inspired by all those games which have started with some vague waffle about how role-playing is like improvisational radio theatre, have followed it with a sample dialogue, without any explanation as to how and why people said what they did, and then plunged straight into tables of character generation. I’m also indebted to my own players, half of whom were complete beginners.

- Paul Mason

The etiquette of roleplaying

Inigo Hartas, who is the son of my dear friend and long-time colleague Leo, is a roleplayer. My position as Inigo’s godfather is ironic, given that I’m not religious (if you don't count an atavistic reverence for Odin - or maybe I mean Alan Moore, if indeed they're not one and the same on the mythago level), but perhaps I can take credit for having helped inspire his favourite hobby at least.

I began roleplaying when I was a little older than Inigo is now. He often says things that are a lot smarter than I would have come out with at his age. The hobby wasn’t invented back then, that’s my excuse. We had to work it all out from first principles.

There are a few pointers I’ve learned over the years that are de rigueur for a good roleplaying campaign. I don’t think players like Inigo need me to tell them this stuff; they’re breathed it in as they played since their pre-teen years. But it’s the nature of experience to want to share itself around, so here goes.

Oh, first a couple of preambles. I don’t use the term games-master or dungeon-master. The role has too much control anyway, and that just makes it an excuse to boss players around with your sublimated ambitions as a frustrated novelist. Call them referees or umpires.

Also, when a referee foists a plot on the players and has them jump through all his or her story hoops, I call that a “thatched” game, after the way the late and unlamented British prime minister ran her Cabinet. If you want to write a novel, please go right ahead – it’s easier today than it has ever been. But don’t co-opt me to be one of your shoe-horned characters. I’m here to roleplay.

Okay, to the tips:

Focus 
Keep your mind on the game, stay in character, don’t suddenly start yakking on about how something that happened in the game reminds you of a trailer on YouTube. Honestly, you can natter any time, but to do it during the game is rude to the other players. Also, it wastes 90% of the power of what a roleplaying campaign can deliver. Imagine a play if the actors kept running to the front of the stage to tell you about their day. Commit to the experience, remain in character throughout, and you will go places no movie or novel or videogame will ever take you.

Don’t block
This is from improv, and it’s about keeping a smooth flow. If a player says, ‘I call my butler,’ the referee shouldn’t say, ‘You don’t have a butler.’ That’s jarring. If the player-character’s finances don’t stretch to manservants, now there’s a plot thread to develop. What happens when the butler asks to be paid? If the character can’t afford it, maybe the butler goes off disgruntled – and he’s armed with the secrets that have been discussed among the PCs while he poured their drinks. Thus the plot will thicken.

Don’t be authorial
Players need to think about the character from the inside. It should be, ‘I do this,’ not, ‘Geralt does this.’ For this reason I dislike the mental disadvantage rules you find in games like GURPS where being shy, for instance, or sadistic gives you extra points to spend on your character build. The rationale is that NPCs’ reaction rolls will be adversely affected by knowing you’re prone to get off on watching toenails being pulled out. Well, balderdash. First because no referee makes a habit of rolling NPC reactions, second because most of those authored traits will get forgotten in play because they were only taken for the points bonus, and third because all that character stuff should come across in the roleplaying anyway.

Maintain the atmosphere
This is for the referee. You are your players’ eyes and ears. Evoke the scene for them. This isn’t about purple description, it’s about clarity and verisimilitude. As a corollary, don’t lie to players about what they would know. ‘The axe chops you in half. Only kidding, you get to roll dodge,’ is not much funnier than telling a blind man that the kerb he’s stepping off is a ten foot drop. Don’t abuse the power you have as referee, instead help everyone to immerse themselves seamlessly in the events of the game.

Respect the rules
Like Hammurabi, I don’t want to be ruled by whims but by laws. The rules are the court of appeal that allow the players to know that the game world is fair and that they really have agency and aren’t just getting to sit in on the referee’s thatched storyline. You can have house rules, of course, but make sure everybody is aware of those before the game starts.In short, dear referee, don't be arbitrary. People came to play a game and participate in the creation of an emergent narrative, not to give your ego a stroking.

An example: I ran a Dark Ages scenario where the characters were up against a near-immortal time-travelling foe who had a thousand years’ greater experience and skill than they did. At one point, a lone player crept into the enemy base. Unknown to him, this immortal foe was there. The player-character came across him, facing the other way along a passageway. On his own, he stood no chance. But he rolled for stealth, the immortal rolled for perception and – against the odds, he tiptoed right up behind him and killed the guy before he could react. Was I tempted to thatch it, having devised this top bad guy only to see him cut down by one surprise attack? Sure, but I knew that we were now in unplanned territory, and that always makes for a more interesting game. Trust the dice and the rules to be the wings of inspiration.

Freedom is everything
A roleplaying game is not a scripted story. Regardless of what the referee may have planned, the players should feel at liberty to act however they feel their characters really would. That’s why we call it roleplaying, not boardgaming. ‘But what if they ignore my plot?’ you cry. ‘What if they split the party? What if they do something that ends my campaign?’ My reply: they can’t. Because it’s not your campaign, it’s theirs. If they become wanted fugitives, that’s the campaign now. If they split into factions that want to kill each other, go with that and see where it leads. This has happened in my own games and because of that we’ve had experiences (such as a Tsolyani civil war and a long plan to drive a character mad) that none of us could have foreseen. To roleplay well, you must delight in the unexpected. (Control freaks sent into a panic by this concept, please see above re the ease of publishing your own novel.)

For the best advice on roleplaying, I recommend Paul Mason’s articles in this Imazine freeware archive.And for all the truly transformative experiences I've had in four decades of roleplaying, I'd like to thank those I've played with - including, but not limited to: Paul Mason, Steve Foster, Oliver Johnson, Robert Dale, Jack Bramah, Mark Smith, Mike Polling, Sheldon Bacon, Frazer Payne, Les Binet, Pauline Ashall, Penny Newman, Gail Baker, David Bailey, Dermot Bolton, Mark Wigoder Daniels, Tim Harford, Paul Gilham, Aaron Fortune, Zelah Meyer, Andrew Mounstephen, Tim Savin, Simone Cooper, Nathan Cubitt, Nick Henfrey, Andy Murdin, John Whitbourn, Steve Wilshire, Patrick Brady, Mark Wilkinson, Paul Deacon, Roz Morris, and of course Jamie Thomson. It was because of all the years we've spent in imaginary realities that Fabled Lands exists at all.

Further reading:

Play Unsafe: How Improvisation Can Change The Way You Roleplay

Tekumel

“THE MOST BEAUTIFULLY DONE FANTASY GAME EVER CREATED…”

It sounds like he's describing a succulent steak, but this was in fact how Gary Gygax introduced Professor M A R Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne game when it was first published in 1975. “It is difficult for me,” Gygax continued, “to envision the possibility of any rival being created in the future.” TSR Inc (in those days still Tactical Studies Rules) were the publishers, so possibly one would want to take a pinch of salt with this particular steak. But they gave EPT the most lavish production of its day: $27.50, equivalent to the cost of the entire set of 2nd edition Dragon Warriors books – or a meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant, if you prefer. It seems like there was a genuine feeling at TSR that in EPT they had something special.

Petal Throne was, in fact, a commercial failure. Mainly this would have been because EPT was a fully realized campaign world which gave it a natural slant towards role-creation and improvisation. In that sense it was probably on the market five years too early. What also didn't help was that no backup material was released, and given that it was nearly three times as expensive as the three D&D starter books at the time, there was little chance that it would pick up any new converts. The game passed into that hideous unlife known as cult status, then TSR (by now more than happy with Greyhawk as a campaign world) sold it to Gamescience, who commissioned Professor Barker to do a new version.

The new game Swords & Glory, consisted of three volumes: the Sourcebook, detailing the world of Tekumel without reference to any rule system; the Players' Book, which has probably the most exhaustive set of role-playing rules imaginable (I do mean that as a backhanded compliment); and the Referee's Book, which was destined never to appear. The Sourcebook was absolutely perfect for a committed referee with a group of gamers already sold on Tekumel. But it lacked the easy-in that EPT’s much more primitive game mechanics (EPT was a D&D variant) had allowed. Nor was it easy to point a new player at any one passage that would give him a potted history of what he knew about the world.

Before long, Tekumel passed to a publisher called Theater of the Mind, who came out with series of gamebooks called Adventures on Tekumel that were supposed to let players learn about Tekumel by growing up and going on a bunch of solo adventures before moving on to a full RPG called Gardasiyal: Deeds of Glory that unfortunately assumed that the guy running the game would have access to other source material, because it was sorely lacking in the flimsy pamphlets in TOTM’s boxed set.

Even back in 1994, releasing an RPG in a box seemed bonkers – and so it proved, as Tekumel sank again, only to be helped out of the waters of Lethe by the Guardians of Order, who published a nice hardback RPG called Tekumel. As the name suggests, they had decided to stop preaching to the choir and actually deliver a straightforward game that didn’t assume you were already a fan.

Such is the history. You ought to have recognized the zealous tones of the true believer by now. EPT was my own introduction to roleplaying games, and I lose no opportunity to recommend it as the single most worthwhile RPG purchase one could make - even to the extent of slipping in plugs for it in my own role-playing books. The assertion I'm making here is nothing less than this: that if your games collection omits EPT and/or Tekumel then you are wasting money on any purchase of straight rules-horses like Pendragon, RuneQuest or Dungeons & Dragons. Now I'll try to explain why.

The "group improvised narrative" concept is basic to EPT. There are indeed underworlds below many of the ancient cities of Tekumel, but they are not intrinsically an important feature of the game. (I first met the lads at old Games Workshop in 1980 to discuss designing an RPG for them, and I mentioned that our role-playing sessions didn't include very much in the way of ‘dungeons’. Expressions of incredulity: “But . . . in that case, what do you do?” Well, er, we roleplay of course.) Barker's primary interest is in the politics and social etiquette of his world, and this is the prevailing theme throughout his rules. The original EPT game began with the players – simple fishermen from the south – arriving in Jakalla harbor in their small boats. Immediately, one is thrown into a bizarre and breathtaking culture: the bewilderment of the player parallels that of the character. Curt officers of the Omnipotent Azure Legion explain that you should remain within the Foreigners' Quarter unless under the patronage of a Tsolyani citizen; if you venture out into Jakalla proper you might easily commit some breach of etiquette, and without the protection of one of the Tsolyani clans you will be given short shrift by the authorities. If you learn fast you might just be able to stay alive. Once you have sufficient wealth and social prestige, you may be able to buy your way into one of the lower clans and petition the Imperial Court for citizenship. That could lie years in the future.

For the moment all you have of value is your boat, and if you sell that it might just pay for a few days in a grubby hotel and an employment notice in the Palace of the Realm. The impoverished and wretched scruffs who stagger along Jakalla wharf, hopefully towards fame and fortune, area far cry even from the roving (well-fed, well-equipped) young bloods of a Glorantha campaign - let alone the armored veterans of a beginning D&D or Dragon Warriors game.

Eventually a patron will contact you (hopefully before your money runs out) and a series of tables then indicate who he/she is and what will be the nature of your employment. The flavor of the game is that you might set out anywhere, with the emphasis on improvisation and free action rather than on set scenarios. An example: one game that I ran to introduce players to EPT went on for an entire day, with a series of ever more complex escapades around Jakalla, without a single reference to rulebook or dice. That kind of thing is of course not unique, and is the way a lot of campaigns are going these days. But this was in the mid-‘70s, when there were very few games that allowed that kind of richness of improvisation.

That is how the game runs, but that is just something that is to be looked for in any good campaign. It is the underlying texture and structure of Barker's world which makes this flow so easily. The rule systems of the original EPT book were derived from D&D, but Barker had actually been playing in a group without rules or referee since Tekumel's inception in the '50s. As a result, Tekumel is fully constructed at a core level rather than being defined by the rules. Glancing at the spells, for instance, it soon becomes clear that there is a correspondence between certain spells and the various Temples (I'm referring to EPT, Barker makes this correspondence explicitly in S&G). This goes rather deeper into the real needs of a functioning society than the rather naive notion of artillery-spells-for-war-gods. A Tsolyani general naturally expects his sorcerer-priests to be adept at battlefield healing as well as mass destruction and intelligence-gathering. Tsolyanu has the appearance of a society that has evolved along real human lines, rather than an artificially-constructed confection like, say, Krynn or Thieves' World.

Barker is an anthropologist, historian and linguist, which perhaps explains the thoroughness and internal logic of his world. That is one side of the coin. The other is that all through his writing it is obvious that an extraordinarily potent imagination is at work. This is not merely a run-of-the-mill fantasy environment but something else. Something which has the capacity to engage the imagination and keep it stimulated. A lesson which any campaign designer could learn from Barker is in his use of archetypes and primary images. As regular readers of this blog will know by now, one of my pet hates is the automatic use of elves, dwarfs, etc, outside their appropriate and effective context. Almost everybody who sits down to hack out a fantasy milieu for a novel or game seems to think they've got to have these critters populating the place or it won't be fantasy. Even Greg Stafford (no dimwit he) did this in the early days of Glorantha, then seemed to regret it and went revisionist on us and turned elves into spaced-out walking vegetables, trolls into Pro-Am fans.

Barker started from another point of departure entirely: Mayan, Aztec, Indian – and others; the sources aren't easy to spot. He has taken a clever approach. Instead of creating fear, aggression, wistfulness in player-characters by means of images that provoke these reactions in the players themselves, Barker provides little nudges that redefine the responses – recreate archetypes in new terms for the PCs. As he says in the first paragraph of EPT: “Players quickly learn to shiver just as much at the sound of chiming and the odor of musty cinnamon as they do at the creaking of Dracula's coffin or the distant bellowing of the Minotaur.” The cues he refers to are the language and scent of the Ssu, an exceptionally horrible alien species with four long lower limbs, bulbous black eyes atop a conical head, and a gray integument that grows in rolls around the creature's skeleton and tends to slough away (producing the musty odor). I'm not doing a Monster Manual bit. The point is that if you look at film of a wolf spider you will see the same beady, baleful gaze and the same eerie stalking motion of the limbs - but Barker, working on a widespread uneasiness to create a frisson in his fantasy world, would never do anything so obvious as simply using giant spiders. The cinnamon smell and the chiming just make sure you're primed for the visceral shock when it comes. This is not mere ‘games mastering', this is direction.

There is a dizzying array of Tekumel products. They're comprehensive, certainly, but the sheer range of choice leaves any outsider wondering where to begin. I’ll just run quickly through the main items and then give my own recommended reading list. Empire of the Petal Throne is the original game. It gives a complete overview of Tekumel (enough to get a campaign up and running) and is consequently quite a good taster. But it’s essentially a D&D variant with emphasis skewed towards dungeon-bashy adventure. For the real thing, you need Swords & Glory: The Tekumel Sourcebook. This is the one with just about everything about the world (including maps), but it has no rules material at all so you miss out on the distinctive Tekumelani magic items such as the Little House of Tranquil Dwelling, the Eye of Joyful Sitting Amongst Friends, the Eye of Triumphant Passage Through Infernos, the Excellent Travelling Volume, etc. etc ...

Swords & Glory: Players' Handbook contains Prof Barker's own rules: quite a complicated system (Barker himself says it's a mix 'n' match selection - he doesn't expect anyone to use everything) but even if you’re going to use another system you must get this book eventually if you want Barker's rules for status, skills, clans and temple promotion (and the tree-branch magic system).

Deeds of the Ever-Glorious gives histories for the eighty-five legions of Tsolyanu, and in doing so builds a picture of the last twenty centuries of Tsolyani civilization. The Book of Ebon Bindings describes some of the demons, or minor deities, of Tekumel. You could work a magic system directly from this, and hundreds of anecdotes make it a great read.

There are two scenario packs – The Tomb Complex of Nereshanbo and A Jakallan Intrigue. Neither of these are by Barker himself, and are not really worth the effort of seeking out. The first is routine and the second, while not without its ingenious touches, is the sort of thing I would expect to handle without any prepared material. The Tsolyani Language comes in two volumes – yes we're into fanatic territory here; only one person I know can read and speak Tsolyani.

Where to start, then? Simplest and most straightforward is the GOO book Tekumel. This has a simple, elegant game system and a comprehensive description of the world, thanks in large part to Patrick Brady, with all the history, mythology and culture you need to run a campaign. As a game Tekumel didn’t get much support, but to be honest the sort of person who is going to enjoy running a Tekumel campaign is probably capable of cooking up their own scenarios and won’t rely on published supplements. Indeed, it’s hard to see how published adventures would be of much use to a good Tekumel campaign, as events should flow so seamlessly from the lives of the specific characters that you never do just plonk down an adventure and expect them to get on with it. Instead, it is the players who tell the referee what they want to do. As it really should be in all roleplaying.

“What kind of a world, then is Tekumel? Socially and culturally, Tekumel is as complex—and as alien to modern thinking—as Byzantium, ancient Egypt, Tenochtitlan, or the India of the Mughals.” – Professor M A R Barker

This is a slightly modified version of a feature I wrote for Imazine #17 (summer 1987). The illustrations are by John Goodier from Deeds of the Ever Glorious.

Creating a character who can surprise you

As a lead-in to a run of Empire of the Petal Throne scenarios and features we have coming up, here is an abridged version of an article by Tim Harford that originally appeared in the Oxford University RPG Society newsletter. The subject under discussion is the choice between Design At Start or Develop in Play for player-characters. The prelude game that Tim refers to, based on my Falesa island campaign setting, was achieved by having the players actually run through their own experiences during the 25 years of recent history described in the campaign notes. You can read Tim's whole article here.

The Generation Game
by Tim Harford

After years as a referee, I’m getting involved as a player in two major campaigns. The tortuous births of Baron Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin and, on the other hand, the Energetic and Modest Kotáru hiShathirin have been with me throughout the writing of this article. The experience has highlighted the choice between character generation (largely random) and character design.

Generation - Kotáru hiShathirin

Kotaru was "rolled up" for the world of Tekumel. A central plank of the character generation system is a D&D-like process of simply rolling attributes.

It’s easy to knock holes in the random design system. It’s not "fair". It’s not "logical". In defense of randomization, a few throws of the dice by Lady Fate do a lot to thwart the forces of cliché. Kotáru has Cleverness* 20 and Reasoning 3 - an absolute academic failure with a brilliant scheming mind! We lack literary models for this, and a good thing too. In Kotáru’s case, this is a stimulating challenge for me.

Another advantage of the generation system is that I was able to produce Kotáru from scratch in about ten minutes, knowing nothing about the Tirikelu system.

Design - Alexei Karenin

The Baron Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin was designed for a game of Traveler using GURPS. GURPS has a full-on design system: attributes, training, status, appearance and contacts all have a price, with a budget set by the referee.

Now, it’s all very well putting detailed design rules in, but one of the reasons it had been so long since I’d designed a character in GURPS was that I simply didn’t have the energy - I’d let whoever was refereeing do it for me. Now, with both a campaign and a character I could really get excited about, I’d been looking forward to designing Karenin.

Karenin took me eight hours to design - and this given ten years’ familiarity with the system and a very clear character conception to work from. But that wasn’t the only problem.

In fact, the firm preconception I had was itself a real obstacle. The aim of character design systems is to allow you to design exactly the character you want, within reason. But this only works if the character fits the system. Superficially, GURPS allows anything. In fact, there’s an envelope of efficient designs which, while broad, excludes many perfectly reasonable character concepts.

The GURPS point system pretty much requires that you choose particular complementary abilities. We see a lot of sneaky, acrobatic warrior types, because if you buy high Dexterity to boost your combat skills, you might as well spend a few coppers to become an all round Olympic gymnast. You can get a similarly fearsome bruiser by making him strong and tough, but the fringe benefits of being able to shadow people, escape from handcuffs, cheat at cards and ride horses just don’t come packaged in. Shame.

We also see wizards, engineers or net-runners who also happen to be splendid tacticians, diplomats or doctors. As I say, it’s a broad envelope but there are plenty of perfectly fair designs that just don’t fit.

The GURPS points costs, then, aren’t well conceived. But is there a more fundamental problem? Alexei faced a tremendous expense in acquiring the fencing and motorcycle skills he wanted, more as an affectation as anything else. In a fantasy campaign, being able to fight and ride as well as the Baron would be formidable: in a science fiction campaign, it was mere color, unlikely to be more than chrome. GURPS aspires to price up characters for any background, and the project seems doomed to fail on those terms**.

Certainly, any system which prices abilities based on how difficult it is to acquire them, rather than on how useful they will be, will fail to create "fair" characters – which presumably was part of the aim. One wonders whether we wouldn’t be better off using Paul Mason’s Outlaws Light system*** :

"Write down what your character is like. Then go through and write a bonus number for each area in which they differ from the average. The number can be positive or negative to indicate aptitude or ineptitude, and can range from 1 to 5 (although most areas should be 1 or 2)."

Design and authoriality

Depending on one’s view of the nature of role-playing, character design has a serious flaw, or great benefit. In the Black Corner, we have White Wolf and the Storytellers. Boo! In the Corner of Iridescent Holiness, we have me, Paul, Dave and all right-thinking folk.

The bout is to decide whether the players and referee are combining to tell a story - the Black Corner’s viewpoint - or whether plot is something which only exists in retrospect, having arisen from the interaction of fictional personalities.

The Black Corner holds that the character is a storytelling tool. The player should wield this tool to help the other players and the referee produce a good story. We might call this an authorial approach.

The good guys suggest that the pursuit of a good story is self-defeating. The best way to play, we suggest, is to treat your character as a person and think yourself into the role. You may skew what the referee had in mind, but perhaps she should have been more flexible - with a good referee and a mature bunch of players, the outcome will usually be a great story which surprises everyone.

Anyone who has encountered this old chestnut will have their own opinion. Suffice it to say that a self-conscious process of character design is highly authorial and so it plays into the hands of the Storytellers.

In creating Alexandrovich Karenin, I could have been a storyteller and designed a character with a view to helping the referee. I’m glad I didn’t, because I am sure the result would have been insipid. Instead I turned myself into the referee for a while. I thought about how he should be played, the kind of political interests he would have, his contacts, his allies, his old lovers and his mortal enemies. This has certainly provided the referee with some material to go on, but at the same time gives him a real headache. This kind of conflict is inevitable in a character design system.

Kotáru grows up

Let’s return to Kotáru. I said that Kotáru took about ten minutes to generate, but this was disingenuous of me. Kotáru’s character actually took eight hours, just the same as the Baron Karenin.

As I’ve said, while creating Karenin, I was effectively referee for the day. The result was good. The eight hours spent generating Kotáru hiShathirin was better. Having taken a few minutes to put together the basics about Kotáru, and to think a little bit about what he was like, I joined the other players and the referee in a joint prelude, spanning many events in our lives rather than focusing on a single epiphany. That prelude turned out to be a fantastic session.

As Kotáru grew up we found out about life on Falesa Island, the Hlüss under the pile of stones on the rock, my unexpected enemy, when Kotáru’s betrothed Kala turned the air blue with her curses and whether she was justified, how Kotáru’s strange younger cousin Kishonu hiLanaka is insatiably curious, and what the friendship between Kishonu and Kotáru is really based on.

When the game itself started, we understood how weird the Nom was, and how great the sacrifice of Chondrek hiLanaka, and why we owed the Stranger great honor.

Much as I love Alexei, I wonder which was the better use of eight hours.

A modest proposal

In his White Dwarf article**** “Origin of the PCs”, Pete Tamlyn set the industry a challenge to produce a game with many ways of producing a character, from a full-fledged design system to a method which would allow fairly detailed characters to be generated with a few quick rolls of the dice - either to allow play to commence quickly, or to allow the referee to produce NPCs.

We haven’t seen too many examples of that, but here are a few suggestions. From the anti-authorial viewpoint, a full-fledged design system is not what is required. Instead, we need to think more about the process which produced the person represented on our creased and coffee-stained character sheets. What is her history? Where did he grow up? How did she spend her time when she was young? Who trained him to hold a sword like that? Why is he so nervous of left-handed men? Why won’t she go to confession? And what does all this mean for the numbers on the piece of paper the player holds in his hand?

The player needs a framework to think about these questions. This could be anything from a simple list of points to consider to a programmed prelude along the lines of a gamebook - make choices about your character’s youth, and note down the skill bonuses along the way. An example:

1 When you were very young, did people say about you:
"He’ll be a great warrior, like his father." (2)
"Such a sickly thing! A miracle he survived." (3)
"He’s got such a sparkle in his eyes." (4)
"Always getting into trouble, that child." (5)

Each answer will affect skills and attribute modifiers, and some may spin the character down unforeseen paths. Later on, the questions may be a little less mystical. These would be questions about how you spent your adolescence:

78 Now that you are a squire, what do you do with your spare time?
Flirt with the ladies of court (+1 Bard, +1 Etiquette)
Run errands for a castle craftsman (+2 to a Craft skill)
Spend time around the stables (+1 Riding, +1 Animal handling)
Keep training (+2 Sword, -1 Charisma)
Get up to mischief (+1 Stealth, +1 Pickpocket)

It’s possible to go into a lot more detail, but that is probably not appropriate. It may well be appropriate to elaborate, but that is probably best left to the player’s imagination - or even better, some prelude time with the referee present. The thing that appeals to me about the gamebook format is that it can be made fractal - you can zoom in or out depending on the level of detail you require. To speed the process up, sections of decision-making can be bypassed and given summary statistics:

Train as a squire: +2 Sword, +1 Etiquette, +1 Riding, +1 Strength.

Or, at any point, a one-line summary can be made into a play session lasting anything from a couple of minutes to a whole afternoon. Just how successful was that flirtation with the court ladies? You picked up some skill points, perhaps, but what else: A jealous rival? A reputation? A social disease? A bouncing baby boy? An adoring new friend?

To allow for these fractal possibilities, the generation system needs to be modular. For example, character development could consist of:

• Potential at birth: attributes, rolled randomly perhaps, or chosen using a point system;
• Childhood: roll on a table, play it out, or use a programmed scenario;
• Adolescence: as above;
• Apprenticeship: as above. Childhood, adolescence and apprenticeship could all be combined in a summary template to save time, if that’s what required - back to the old "character class" system;
• Careers. Traveler pioneered the idea of describing the training a character had received in terms of one or more careers. Each career, again, can be described by summary statistics or the highlights can be played out.

This process builds a tremendous amount of background detail. It also allows for a significant degree of player choice while avoiding the absurd mathematical trade-offs inherent in a point-based design system.

It has its disadvantages, too. It’s a lot of work for the referee and for the designers - but they love that. It’s also quite incompatible with the "generic" vision of GURPS: character generation is inextricably bound up with the details of the game world. Some people will find that an objection, but for me it’s a tremendous way to introduce a game world and a type of campaign.

I’m struck by how little has changed in the hobby since Pete Tamlyn’s article. I think that a prelude-heavy form of character generation is a step forward, despite the practical objections. Perhaps these ideas are most likely to be carried forward with electronic resources. Until then, the young heroes Alexandrovich Karenin and Kotáru hiShathirin march forward into a bright future.

* The best explanation I have seen is "Kirk has cleverness, Spock has reasoning."
** There are patches for this, of course. Frazer Payne suggested a simple multiplier. The referee spends a few minutes - or hours, more likely - going through the book and applying multipliers to each advantage and skill. There’s a point break: Primary (x 1), Secondary (x 2/3) and Peripheral (x 1/10). Alexei’s strength is secondary, as is his Baronial status. His theological studies and his fencing are peripheral. On the other hand, his ability to pilot a starfighter is fairly central to the game...
*** You can find Outlaws Light in Imazine #33 
****White Dwarf #72 (Dec 1985).

The shape inside the bone

One afternoon, many years ago, Oliver Johnson and I were talking about Tekumel. Oliver had heard me talk about my Empire of the Petal Throne sessions, but he'd never played in that campaign. Taking the big colour map of Jakalla, Oliver laid it on the floor and said, “So tell me about this city as if I were looking down on it from outer space.”

That was how we began one of our best games. In a few hours we had somehow dredged up, inferred and/or mutually created the background of Oliver's character, Jasper Faze, and how he came to be orbiting Tekumel even though there are no other inhabited worlds in its universe.

At one point Jasper beamed down to the city. When an ionic storm prevented his swift return, we began to suspect his ship's computer was not wholly reliable. Accidentally offending against the Jakallan code of etiquette, Jasper became embroiled in a struggle. A crowd gathered. "I use my anti-gravity belt to rise above them,” Oliver said.

We hadn’t discussed equipment at all, but obviously he had to have an anti¬gravity belt or he couldn't have mentioned it. “You rise above the crowd and drift over their heads in a sweeping arc. The breeze is carrying you towards the seafront.”

"I'll engage the thrusters to correct my course.”

"No effect. Worse, as you pass over the quayside you realize you're losing height.”

Jasper complained to the ship's computer, only to find that it was unable to broadcast power to his personal equipment because of the necessity of sustaining the ship's shields during the ion storm. The prime directive to protect the ship was one Jasper had issued himself. Naturally, he could not now change it because the computer could not verify his identity until he was back on board. He went down in the sea, was picked up by a prison patrol boat—and so on from frying pan to fire, and worse, throughout a very enjoyable afternoon's session.

We had learned a lot about improvisation just by doing it. For one thing, we discovered that the important rules aren't the ones written in the book (which we didn't have to hand, nor any dice) but the rules that derive from the nature of group storytelling. Like the thing with the anti-grav belt. We saw straight away the fun of trying to thwart each other's intentions without actually blocking—or, alternatively, to take an idea in an unexpected direction. To stymie without refusing and to outdo without competing.

I came across Keith Johnstone's book Impro a few years later. Johnstone describes improvisation techniques that he uses in theatre to free up people's creativity, both as actors and as writers. I liked especially this quotation from the Tao Te Ching which also sums up how I believe narrative should emerge from a role-playing session:

The sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practises the teaching that uses no words. When his task is accomplished, the people all say, "It happened to us naturally." I take no action and people are transformed of themselves.

I regard this as all-important in any discussion of what has been called 'narrative' rolegaming because often people assume that the term implies authoriality. There is no doubt that one of the referee's possible roles is as author of part of the narrative. When players seem to be having trouble getting inspired, I might drop in a surprise of my own devising or (better still) let something appear randomly. But it's always important not to break the suspension of disbelief by seeming to have steered the narrative—and, in fact, it's less fun for the referee himself as well.

Carl Weber, writing about Brecht, says: "...the actors would suggest a way of doing something, and if they started to explain, Brecht would say he wanted no discussion in rehearsal—it would have to be tried "

Quite right too. Articles about role-playing are such a frig. Same with articles about writing. Just do it...

That's what goes wrong so often with character generation. As soon as players start to think about what's needed, they start to get authorial. Then they think, “I mustn't come up with anything boring.” So you get players saying, “We're ever so creative in our games. Like, I play a mutant sponge with an IQ of 197 who is strapped to the head of a crocodile from the New York sewers. Bill is a Babylonian priest who was kidnapped by Venusians but who led a slave revolt that caused Venus to become a molten wasteland, but he escaped in a time machine to an alternate 1960s where he became a superhero. And...”

Tedious. My heart sinks at the thought of refereeing such a game. It's just an explosion in an ideas factory. Imagine a novel written that way. Those people should try actually playing—they'd see that the real possibilities come when your character fits within a context. Drama, in fact, is not about character description (ie, what is so-&-so like), it is about character interaction (how does so-&-so relate to other characters).

Anyway, I reckon Keith Johnstone and I agree that theory is over-rated. We're impatient to do the deed, to get in there and make it happen. That's why this book isn't a lot of high-faluting dramatic theory — it's all practical advice, with plenty of examples.

We were talking about character interaction. Johnstone gets right to the heart of it with a long chapter on 'Status'.

"Try to get your status just a little above or below your partner's," I said, and I insisted that the gap should be minimal... Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance.

I'm interested in status as one of the main motors of narrative. It's especially important on Tekumel, where every slight nuance of status is crucially important. Keeping the status differences between players small, as Johnstone recommends, ensures there is an ongoing struggle for face. If I am a noble army officer and you are a street sweeper, our interaction is likely to be stilted and sterile. If we are Yalunequ and Mashmirek, clan cousins of very nearly equal status, every meal, every transaction, every comment becomes a subtle war.

One status relationship that gives immense pleasure to audiences is the master-servant scene. A dramatist who adapts a story for the stage will often add a servant...

Yes, good point, Keith. But the master-servant thing is delightful to audiences. It's less interesting from an internal perspective. That's why, when you find master-servant relationships in games, one party (usually the servant) is often an NPC. The relationship is played to the rest of the group as audience, for comedy value.

I have played servants, but I think the only way for this to be personally rewarding (I mean, to the extent that you can inhabit the character rather than just playing them) is where the power relationship between the characters is not as clear-cut as it seems. An obvious example is a bound demon, genie or sandestin. On one level it's the inferior partner, the servant that must do as it's told. On another it's a powerful, cunning and malicious entity that the master knows he must command with care.

More subtly, a servant character could have advantages denied the master. (These should arise because of his servant status or they're not interesting. A servant who just happens to be a brilliant assassin is a yawn; one who is streetwise and wily where his pampered master is naive—now, there you have something to work with.)

When Eskimos believed that each piece of bone had only one shape inside it, the artist didn't have to 'think up' an idea. He had to wait until he knew what was in there—and this is crucial. When he'd finished carving, his friends couldn't say, "I'm a bit worried about that Nanook in the third igloo,” but only, "He made a mess getting that out!" or "There are some very odd bits of bone about these days."

Yeah, okay, Keith – enough about status. Now, I can't remember the context of the quotation above (it was probably from the 'Spontaneity' chapter) but I choose to regard it as Johnstone addressing the question of creation – specifically, the tools of creativity. Many people worry about dice, for example. “Does the use of dice destroy the purity of our role-playing games?” they say, though what they really mean is, “I feel that dice mark me out as a gaming nerd whereas I'd rather be thought of as an improvising artist.” (Ah, I see... it is still all about status. You are wise, Keith.)

Anyone can run an avant-garde theatre group; you just get the actors to lie naked in heaps, or outstare the audience, or move in extreme slow motion, or whatever the fashion is. But the real avant-garde aren't imitating what other people are doing... they're solving the problems that need solving, like how to get a popular theatre with some worthwhile content, and they may not look avant-garde at all.

The avant-garde. Oh yes, we know what that means in a role-playing context. It means setting great store by all the tricks and theories that supposedly will make us better role-players, but then not actually doing any real role-playing. Or fretting over nonsense like the use of dice, as if it mattered.

Dice are not the problem. Why? Because the system itself should be almost irrelevant. It's just a last court of appeal for players or referee to appeal to when inspiration or credibility fail. So, I use dice in my games but I prefer the sessions where dice are not needed. Nonethless, I see no stigma in saying to a player, “I wonder what the innkeeper thinks of what you've just said?” and then rolling dice to decide. When I'm refereeing, I like to be surprised too—and I like the players to know that this isn't just a story I'm telling them.

Would I use tarot cards, or the I Ching, or suggestions drawn from a hat? Not if it was obtrusive. But you can use anything, can't you? The music that's playing on the hi-fi (especially effective if the players don't notice the connection), the book titles on the shelves, the opposite idea to the one you first thought of. There are some odd bits of bone about, and that's no bad thing.

Many teachers get improvisers to work in conflict because conflict is interesting, but we don't actually need to teach competitive behaviour; the students will already be expert at it, and it's important that we don't exploit the actors' conflicts. Even in what seems to be a tremendous argument, the actors should still be co-operating and coolly developing the action.

Now, I can't agree with you here, Keith. This is back to the authoriality issue. Players aren't interested in the 'story', you see. Story is what happened in restrospect; character is all that matters to them. To get the most out of role-playing, you shouldn't be thinking, “What should my character be doing next?” You just do it. You should be channelling the character, not merely writing their lines. So players have no responsibility at all to treat each other a certain way. If a player says to me as referee, “I spot someone in the street who I used to know,” I think they must be bored with playing and they'd like to referee. If they say, “I used to stammer as a child, until I fell off the temple roof that time,” I think, fine, it's their past and they ought to know; I'll work it in. But if one player says to another, “I hear you just bought a falcon,” there's no onus on the other player to accept and add. He's perfectly entitled to speak in character and simply say, “No I didn't.”

Very often an audience will applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story... the reincorporation does give them pleasure. They admire the improviser's grasp, since he not only generates new material, but remembers and makes use of earlier events that the audience itself may have temporarily forgotten.

The serendipitous placement of this quotation (I'm reproducing them here in the order they occur in the book) inclines me to treat it as a reproach. Keith is reminding me that the rules of narrative creation still apply, even though I am saying I want no truck with authoriality. But I did say earlier that I allowed some authoriality from the referee. He does have responsibility to maintain the narrative (even if he's not consciously creating it) and one of the main things he should avoid is blocking. So, replying to the player-character with the stammer by saying, “You were never on the temple roof,” is a bad response. In other words, the rules of improvisation don't strictly apply between players, because the players inhabit the story. As the protagonists, they only “co-operate” to create the narrative in the sense that two real-life people arguing in the street are co-operating to create a fight. But those rules of improvisation do apply between a player and the referee, which is the interface where mutual narrative creation actually occurs.

I have to digress for a moment because, of course, you can break any rule once you have learned properly how to use it. So, when I said the referee should not block that player-character, there are ways to do so and still make it work. I could say (in character as a clan elder who happens to have overheard): “You only pretended to stammer to get out of lessons, you wretched boy. And you didn't fall off the temple roof at all, you pushed your cousin. He broke his wrist!” It isn't blocking because the player has the opportunity to take it either as what really happened or as an unfair and inaccurate view that others have of him. But this does remind me of a golden rule I would never break, which is that the player has complete authority for what his own character is like. It would be bad faith for me, as referee, to say, “You could have saved your cousin but you deliberately decided not to.” That’s the player’s decision alone.

I hate it when the referee makes value judgements about my characters, too. Who is he? He's not a player character, he's just the bloody referee. For all the power he has over the narrative from above, he has no right at all to intrude himself into it like the omnipotent narrator in an early Victorian novel. That's why I don't like the term 'game-master'. Master? Master of what? Bollocks. He's not a master of anything, he's a referee.

Sorry, Keith, I got a bit carried away. What do you reckon?

If I say, "Make up a story," then most people are paralysed. If I say, "Describe a routine and then interrupt it," people see no problem.

Now, that's certainly a good lesson for referees. Too often, of course, they write out the whole damned scenario and then the poor players are left desperately trying to claim participation (and inject some interest) by breaking routines, but the referee just won't allow them to do it. This is known as thatching, after our "cherished" former prime minister who famously would brook no contrary point of view. A lesser form of the same dictatorial approach is when the referee refuses to indulge the player-characters' concerns. That is, the referee decides that the campaign has a direction and a theme which is not the direction and theme that interest the player-characters. It's always more rewarding if referee and players can approach the session with an open mind.

You have to trick students into believing that content isn't important and that it looks after itself, or they never get anywhere.

You're right, Keith. Like those sessions where the players sit around waiting to be entertained. Everything feels blocked. I ask them what they want to do and they say, “Dave hasn't planned anything.” Then someone goes home at 10.30 and the game session is formally wound up. Suddenly, one of the players wants to go shopping for a sword: “I'll do it now so as not to disrupt the next game.” The other players tag along. He is about to buy a fine sword, but one of the other players wants it too. They argue, the sword is snatched – one of them cuts his hand. Another player calls the police, who say, “Unregistered duels on private property are illegal; you're under arrest.” The two characters who were squabbling are marched off to jail, now realising that the third character has stitched them up to get the sword. They swear revenge. But first they must escape...

At three in the morning the players finally go home. Why didn't they have that adventure hours earlier, during the 'session'? Because they thought they had to create the content. But it was waiting inside the bone all along.

* * *

I wrote the article above, which was inspired by Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone, for Paul Mason’s classic RPG fanzine Imazine. You can get Impro here, and back issues of Imazine are available here. The reference to diceless RPGs dates the article, which appeared in 1999. At the time, dice-free gaming was the latest fad of the "too cool for rules" set. (Actually, for all I know it may still be.)

The Tower of Horglin

Well, I asked Paul Mason about running his quarter-century-old Dragon Warriors scenario and he didn't say no. So here it is, almost exactly as it appeared in imazine #14 (the summer 1986 issue). "Papa Don't Preach" was in the charts and Guy Ritchie had recently left school. There's a lot I could say about the scenario itself, but let's save all that for the comments...

The Tower of Horglin
by Paul Mason

REFEREE'S INTRODUCTION
This scenario is an exercise in irony. It is also designed to give maximum scope for the legendary-medieval atmosphere of Dragon Warriors to come out. For this reason, it may well be considered too high powered by players used to traditional games and the concept of game balance. This is a recreation (not a simulation) of folklore - the likes of The Mabinogion, and the Grail stories. Magic is powerful, but unreliable and dangerous. An adventurer must rely on his or her wits and self-confidence to avoid a violent end. Do not be afraid to kill any player character who treats the adventure as an exercise in strategy.

There are relatively few NPCs in this scenario. It should therefore be easier to invest each one with a distinct personality. Guidance is given in the character descriptions - it is up to the referee to interpret these.

The adventure requires that the Wight Wood be inserted into your campaign setting. The stream which flows by the wood has been called the Fringa stream - you will probably have to rename it as appropriate to your local environment.

The adventure is designed for a group of chivalrous individuals (preferably knights), It commences in a con¬venient town, with the player characters being accosted in their place of accommodation.

SYNOPSIS
The player characters encounter a woman, clearly distraught. She explains that an evil sorcerer has laid a curse on her. She persuades the heroes to assist her by travelling to the sorcerer's tower and killing him. They journey towards the wood, encountering a deadly black knight, who disputes with them over the bridge he guards. Within the wood, they may encounter a ghoul and some centaurs, and will be ambushed by a malicious band of goblins. Finally reaching the tower, and braving the menaces therein, the gallant band will discover that their quest was pointless. The sorcerer is already dead, slain by the demon from whom he had learned his Black Arts.

A CRY FOR HELP
One of the most cliched methods for involving characters in an adventure is to use the 'little-old-man-runs-into-the-inn' technique. Without any shame at all, therefore, I present the opening for this adventure. A woman accosts the player characters wherever they are staying, She introduces herself as Edira of Cronwic (see Character Descriptions). She is in a very emotional state. She explains that she has appealed to all who bear arms in the town but none was brave or valorous enough to help her. Any NPCs in the vicinity will be edging away from her as she speaks. It is clear that no-one has any intention of assisting her. Perhaps they know something?

Edira will use as much emotional blackmail as she can muster. She will play on the sympathies of the heroes as well as appealing to their honourable natures. She will tell, with much dignity, the tale of how an evil sorcerer called Horglin has laid a curse on her because of some slight he imagines she has done him. Every month, a black-clad rider with a fiery sword burns her crops, kills her livestock, and destroys her possessions. She has appealed to the lord of the manor for assistance. Baron Melius has a suspicious and unsympathetic nature, however - he will have none of it.

She describes her freeholding, several miles down the road. Finally, begging for assistance, she explains that she can offer nothing in recompense to those who free her from the curse, but she begs the heroes to help in the name of chivalry and compassion.

ARABLE RUBBLE
Edira's freeholding lies a few miles away, along the highway for the most part, then along a short cart rut. Once there, the first thing the player characters will notice is the smell of dead meat and rotting vegetables. In the farmyard lies the corpse of a goat, while three very young children sit in the dirt, crying hopelessly. Edira tells the characters that the Black Rider last appeared three days ago. She has reason to believe that Horglin, the sorcerer who cursed her, lives in a tower in the middle of the forest. She points to a large, brooding wood about two miles away. This is known as the Wight Wood, a place shunned by the locals. The trees are in the main large, old pine firs, many of them dead.

As the adventurers arrive at the freeholding, dusk is falling. Edira offers them pallets for the night, should they wish to stay. Alternatively they may like to chase straight off for the wood.

A KNIGHT AT THE BRIDGE
The track to the woods leads to a bridge across the Fringa stream, a fast-flowing torrent on its way to join the major river of the region. The Fringa must be crossed to reach the woods. But it isn't as easy as it sounds. On the far side of the bridge, a knight in full armour (with grey accoutrements) disputes passage to everyone (knight or not). If it is not after sunset, the area will be shrouded in a cloying mist that blocks out the rays of the sun. The knight will loom out of the mist as the adventurers cross the bridge.

'You must dispute with me,' a thin voice grates. This is all that is said by the Grey Knight, who will couch his lance and prepare for battle.

The Grey Knight has a terrible secret: he is a Wight. He is bound to the bridge by the same age-old curse that maintains his unliving state. Powerful though he may be, he is vulnerable. Once the players realise that he is one of the undead, they will no longer be under any obligation to behave honourably, and may use whatever methods they may deem necessary. If no magic and/or silver weapons are available, the heroes may like to choose one of the following options: run away (crossing the stream by some other means -use your ingenuities!) or wrestle the Grey Kight over the parapet and into the stream. This heroic action will break the ancient curse upon the Grey Knight, and he will dissolve into dust, washed away in the stream. Details of the Wight can be found in the Character Descriptions section.

INTO THE TREES
The Wight Wood is part of the Mythical Forest. It is the wilderness, the unknown - the symbol of all that is feared. The atmosphere is stifling. Rotting branches, pine needles and ...something else ... combine to create a smell of almost palpable evil. There is noise all about, rustlings, squeakings, birdcalls, and yet it all sounds somehow far away. Despite the noise, there is a feeling of stillness about the wood. There are some things best left undisturbed...

A track leads into the wood. The heroes would be well advised to stick to it. If they don't, then you should treat them to a series of especially nasty encounters, until they flee screaming from the accursed place.

For ten minutes, the adventurers may proceed along the track. They then come upon a fork. The left hand fork appears to lead downwards to a dell in the trees. The right hand path stays more or less on a level, as far as can be ascertained.

The left hand path leads down towards the ghoul's cave, while the right hand path continues to the centaurs' glade.

THE CENTAURS' GLADE
This section is designed as a little light relief but, true to folklore, it has a dark side. As they approach along the path, the heroes hear a series of shouts and snorts coming from ahead. Eventually the path leads to a natural glade, in which six centaurs are supping of the woodbark brew of which they are fond. As the heroes arrive, the centaurs are in the process of trying to ride each other, which gives you an idea of how drunk they really are. Although rather demented, the centaurs don't seem to be in a particularly violent mood. The heroes may wish to reveal themselves and speak to the centaurs, attempting to find out more about Horglin. The centaurs’ speech is a little incoherent, and they have a habit of stringing unconnected images together in their more grandiloquent descriptive passages, but they seem quite prepared to be helpful.

Unfortunately they know nothing about the sorcerer. They are aware of his tower but they shun it. They have occasionally seen a fey horse riding breakneck along the forest path, with a black-clad rider on its back. Mixed in amongst this information will be various obscure references to the 'Time of Wanting' and 'She who Speaks', but if they aren't pressed about these, they won't elaborate. If questioned further about the 'Time of Wanting' the centaurs get nasty, and the adventurers had better dredge up some tact to get out without a fight. 'She who Speaks' is described by them as their friend, who walks among the trees and appears to them in dreams. They will say no more. ('She who Speaks' is actually Edira, who communicates with the centaurs by means of telepathy.)

This scene should allow you to go over the top in the portrayal of a collection of hedonist headcases. In their drunk state, the centaurs are completely out of their skulls, veering wildly between moods and liable to react violently to a mild affront.

On the far side of the clearing, another path leads away into the forest. If followed, this will bring the heroes to the tower of the sorcerer after a few minutes’ walk.

THE GHOUL'S CAVE
On the way to the ghoul's cave there are several false alarms. A fox will rush out of the woods ahead of the adventurers, startling them. A few minutes later, a bat will fly in the face of the first character in line. The path leads downwards, ending at a rock bluff in the middle of the woods. A cave mouth gapes in the rock. This cave is the home of a newly undead ghoul. Since he has only recently joined the ranks of the undead he might even pass for a particularly decrepit human. The referee may like to decide on a chance of the ghoul being at home (I'd suggest 80%) or choose. If he is at home, there's a 50% chance that he will be sleeping on a straw pallet that litters the floor in one corner of the cave. If not asleep, he will be sitting cross-legged on the floor, munching a bone (actually a human femur). What happens next is anybody's guess. The ghoul is not a complete fool, and won't attack a group of people clearly more powerful than himself. He's more likely to attempt some sort of deception, or try to follow the group so that he can ambush them.

In the corner of the cave there is a rockfall. This actually covers the entrance to a tunnel. The tunnel connects the cave with the sorcerer's tower. Finding and uncovering the tunnel will take a while, and it’ll be hot and dirty work. The tunnel is narrow (4’) and low (3' 6"), and leads, after a half a mile, to a flight of stone steps leading up to a heavy wooden trapdoor. This leads to the interior of the tower, but is barred, requiring considerable effort to smash through.

ON THE WAY TO THE TOWER
If the player characters approach the tower from the centaurs’ glade, they will have an unpleasant surprise on the way. As they walk, the mist between the trees thickens and a faint laughter can be heard. On the path ahead, two short, sallow, warty individuals gesture obscenely at the heroes, laughing maliciously. At this point the mist swirls still thicker and these goblins begin to taunt the adventurers. If attacked, the goblins will melt into the mist that cloaks the trees. Their aim is solely to divert the adventurers, or at least one member of the party, drawing them off the path in order to rob and kill them. To this end they will fake voices in the mist, throw stones, break twigs, utter manic laughter, and so on: anything to totally confuse anyone foolish enough to be messing about in the wood. If anyone leaves the path, they will be instantly and totally cut off from all communication with the rest of the group, finding themselves apparently alone in a silent sea of mist. Soon a goblin will come close and begin jeering at the character. After some minutes of this, it will burst out of the mist and attack with its icicle shortsword.

The goblins in this scene should be played as the infantile (though cunning and dangerous) creatures they are in legend. Don't play them in a logical way - the power of faerie is so great that Man's only hope against it is his own determination and steadfastness in the face of pure whimsy. This should be an encounter in which the adventurers learn (if they didn't know already) that even the bravest must run sometimes. No normal group of mortals should be able to capture or defeat such free-willed sprites on their home territory, on their own terms.
If necessary the referee should decide how many goblins there are, and what their powers are. I have left it abstract as I feel this scene is about the mysterious power of faerie. Remember all those fairy tales about not straying from the path? Now you know why!

AT THE DOOR... AND BEYOND
The Tower of Horglin is apparently made of black marble with a shining silvery dome on top. There are no windows and only a massive pair of doors. These open easily when pushed.

The inside of the tower is suffused with a pinkish glow. It is a shambles of broken furniture, burned books, torn tapestries, and so on. The damage is so complete that nothing of value may be salvaged from the wreckage.

There is one item which may be of interest, however. In the centre of the enormous chamber, painted on the floor, is a red pentagram. Anyone stepping on to this will be hit by a Nova spell: myriad beams of searing light shoot from the pentagram hitting everyone within 5 metres. The pentagram is in fact the spell Rune, set up by the sorcerer as a trap for the unwary.

There is nothing else in the tower. All that remains is the silver dome on the roof – if it occurs to the players to investigate that, as there is no way up to it from inside the tower. The tower is some fifteen metres tall, so scaling it may be a problem. Horglin used to create an Astral Gate to reach it.

Assuming they do reach the roof, and if the pentagram in the chamber below has not been activated, the heroes will find that their efforts were in vain. The dome is opaque and reflective - and tough enough to resist the strongest blows. However with the discharging of the Rune spell, the last of Horglin's power will have passed from the earth, and the dome will then be near-transparent and brittle. It can be shattered by any blow, even a gentle tap. Inside is Horglin's private sanctum. On a stone block lies the body of Horglin the Sorcerer, recently dead, with a gaping wound in his chest, from which his heart appears to have been torn. Horglin trifled once too often with Ayperos, his patron demon, and his soul was forfeit. Scattered around the floor are twenty pieces of silver. These lie on a whitish ash - the calcified remnants of Horglin's various potent magical relics and charms.

You may decide to end the scenario on this 'high note'. The players should be shell-shocked, and probably feeling mighty irritated at you. That's always the best way to leave things - they remember the games which provoke a strong response and will later come to treasure their reactions (or they'll decide to kick your head in - I accept no responsibility for any injuries arising out of the running of this scenario). As I said at the beginning, this is an exercise in irony.

Alternatively you may like to develop events from here. Having discovered that their quest was pointless, the heroes may be feeling badly disposed towards Edira. If they have given pause to the strange inconsistencies in her story (Why would a powerful sorcerer decide to curse her? If he did, why could he not just blast her, or torment her with some nameless evil, rather than letting her live?) they may wish to investigate further. But for now, the tale ends here...

FINALLY
Here is some recommended music for the scenario, arranged by section.
A Cry for Help - Prelude from Tristan & Isolde; Wagner
Arable Rubble - The Death of Melisande from Pelleas & Melisande; Sibelius
A Knight at the Bridge — Witches Sabbath Night from Symphonic Fantastique; Berlioz
Into the Trees — Dawn & Siegfried's Rhine Journey, from Götterdämmerung; Wagner
The Centaur's Glade — Uranus from The Planets; Holst
The Ghoul's Cave — The Firebird; Stravinsky
On the Way to the Tower - Also Sprach Zarathrustra; Strauss
At the Door ... and Beyond - Death March from Götterdämmerung; Wagner.

CHARACTER DESCRIPTIONS

EDIRA OF CRONIC
5th rank Mystic
ATTACK 12
DEFENCE 7
MAGICAL ATTACK 18
MAGICAL DEFENCE 8
EVASION 4
Health Points: 9
Armour Factor 0
Weapon: none
Cash: 5 pennies
Edira is a proud woman in her late thirties. She is of noble birth, but she married a freeholding yeoman, foregoing wealth and security out of love for her husband. Five years ago she was widowed, and since then she has had to look after her small landholding, as well as her three young children. If she were not a woman of mystic power, this burden may well have broken her when she recently earned the ire of Horglin. As it is, her strong will and determination to keep her freeholding drive her on.

She earned the hatred of Horglin the sorcerer by protecting the centaurs of the Wight Wood from one of his more unsavoury schemes. He intended to bind them to his will, taming their natural free-spiritedness and forcing them to become his servitors. Edira foiled this plot by stealing the enchanted ring which Horglin was going to use to perform the spell. Hence Horglin sought for some method by which to persuade Edira to return the ring to him. He decided on a slow war of attrition, using the spells Destrier and Vorpal Blade to become the Black Rider, regularly riding to wreak more devastation to the holding, yet riding away before the dawn (using the faerie power of the Destrier to leap the Fringa Stream).

THE CENTAURS
2nd Rank-equivalent
ATTACK 12
DEFENCE 5
MAGICAL DEFENCE 3
EVASION 4
Health Points: 2d6 +9
Armour Factor 0
Weapon: Hooves (d8, 3 points)
In all respects these are normal Centaurs (see The Elven Crystals, Dragon Warriors Book 3 for details). They spend their days capering around the wood, drunk on woodbark brew. When drunk they are extremely merry, but will still be very touchy — particularly about their main religious mystery, the legend of the ‘Time of Waiting’, a secret known only to centaurs.

THE GREY KNIGHT
WIGHT 7th Rank-equivalent
ATTACK 17
DEFENCE 10
MAGICAL ATTACK 20
MAGICAL DEFENCE 10
EVASION 3
Health Points: 21
Armour: Plate (AF:5)
Weapons: Lance (2d4, 5 points), Sword (d8, 4 points).
As explained in the text, the Grey Knight is a wight, cursed to guard the bridge over the stream for the rest of eternity. No-one in the area who knows of his existence will talk of him, believing that this will bring a terrible curse down upon them. Anyone asking about the Grey Knight in a public place in the locality will be urgently shushed, and if persistent will be shunned, and treated in a very surly manner. The sign of protection against the evil eye will be made frequently.

The curse on the Grey Knight can be broken. If he is com¬pletely destroyed by a magic or silver weapon, he will not return. Alternatively, if he comes into contact with the waters of the stream whose bridge he guards, he will crumble to dust, which will dissolve in the stream and be washed away.

THE GHOUL
4th Rank-equivalent
ATTACK 17
DEFENCE 9
MAGICAL DEFENCE 7
EVASION 4
Health Points: 12
Armour: none
Weapons: Dagger (d4, 3 points)
Formerly a crazed hermit, this unfortunate individual was brought to his current condition through his appetite for human flesh. He is a wily old soul, who is unlikely to throw his life away in some desperate attempt to gain the meat he craves. Since he has only recently become a ghoul, he has not yet degenerated to the full ghastliness of ghouldom and can still conceivably be mistaken for a rather pale, lanky and decrepit human. He will probably try to gain the confidence of the adventurers by billing himself as a holy man, and his intense eyes could certainly pass for those of a religious fanatic. If he succeeds in gaining acceptance, he will persuade the heroes that he can lead them to their objective quickly and safely since he knows the wood well. Certainly he knows that the quickest, safest way to Horglin’s tower would be along the tunnel that leads from his cave. His aim will be to get the adventurers to crawl along it so that he can make off with one of them in the gloom, dragging an unconscious person out and into the forest, for a pleasant banquet.