The fire-god's forge

If you listened to Jamie's interview on Facebook a couple of weeks ago, you might have been intrigued by the glancing reference to a project called Vulcanverse. I'll let Jamie explain it:

"The world itself is based on the premise that the god Vulcan is tired of mankind embracing virtual worlds and pushing the gods out of their lives, so instead of fading into the sunset, he embraces it by creating these four quadrants of land. The books will be a prequel to the virtual game, documenting the journey from technology and atheism taking over to the point when the old gods must choose either to fade into memory or to take things into their own hands."

In strictly game-terms it's a Second Life type virtual world in which players can own land and construct and trade their own assets. As this article explains, there are in-world creatures called vulcanites, virtual pets that I'm hoping could mean that something like my Mean Genes idea could finally get developed. (In a nutshell: players can breed and train a stable of nonhuman gladiators who then compete online, and others can watch the gladiatorial battles as a virtual sport whether or not they actually compete themselves.) I thought that one up at Eidos over twenty years ago but couldn't get anyone then to understand it. Now that e-sports are big business and Minecraft has shown the value of user-created content in virtual "playground worlds", maybe these guys will make it happen. Ian Livingstone, who was chairman of Eidos back then, is also involved in Vulcanverse so I'm keeping my fingers (and claws, and mandibles, and tentacles) crossed that we'll see a lot of gaming there.

Of course, in a freely configurable virtual world I could put Mean Genes together myself. That's the beauty of these virtual environments. They are (as I tried explaining to the Eidos execs in the original Mean Genes overview doc back in 1997) the equivalent of a playing field and a ball -- and lots of other things besides -- and you can use them to create games or theatre or tourist spots or sports or political rallies or discussion groups or whatever you like, just the way you can in the real world. I don't know what Vulcan would think of that, but Prometheus would surely approve.

CORRECTION (15/09/20): Ian Livingstone is not a partner in the Vulcanverse venture, at least not at the time of writing. I know it says so in the press release I linked to above, but it also says I'm a partner and in fact I only heard about it last week! So, well worth investing in (I hear they raised over a quarter of a million dollars from sales of plots on the first day) just don't expect a Fighting Fantasy connection.

A wizard prang

I never have managed to get a game of Ars Magica up and running, despite at least two concerted attempts. We even got as far as full character sheets. Why didn't it happen? Perhaps the degree of world-building needed looked too daunting -- though you wouldn't expect that to deter a group battle-hardened by Tekumel and Glorantha.

Mike and Roger were talking about it this month on their Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice podcast. I'll put money on their campaign happening before mine. (I'd even consider putting money on their campaign actually happening.) And I was reminded of one aspect of the Ars Magica rules that was certainly original but that never thrilled me. The troupe system.

I prefer to really steep myself in a character, which means one character at a time. In Ars Magica you play the magi and also their companions (non-wizardly adventuring friends) and sometimes the magi's servants ("grogs") -- the point being that the magi initiate things and formulate plans, but they don't all swan off adventuring together on a regular basis. For me, one of the line-up would feel like my real character and the other two would just be NPCs that I'd play for the sake of the campaign.

The reason for the troupe is that you typically have your group of players turning up each time, and nobody wants to sit out in the kitchen, so the magus/companion/grog arrangement ensures there's always a character for everybody to play. But hang on a tick. If you're playing online, you're no longer constrained by the need to physically assemble a limited number of players at the same time each week. Now you could have some players take the magi; they might be the ones who can't turn up regularly or who are living a long way off and couldn't travel to a physical session anyway. A different group of players could then take the companions. You can assemble a regular game around whoever can show up (usually the companions and one or two of the magi) and keep the grand planning between the magi for special sessions.

There must have been a point where somebody said, "What about if we got two different actors to play Cordelia and the Fool?" Playing over the internet is meant to shake things up. There are different and possibly better ways for your players to enjoy themselves. So I think it's worth considering, at least.

By-the-bye, I like the idea of some characters playing strategically while others get their hands dirty. You could use it for an SOE game -- any war-based campaign come to that. Or it could be a Star Trek style exploration game, with the regular weekly players comprising the away team and those who only have odd moments through the week playing the bridge crew.

Also it occurs to me Ars Magica would be a great system for a Wizards of Grand Motholam campaign. Now will I buckle down and run it? I guess we'll see.

Goodbye to the tabletop?

There's a division among roleplayers when it comes to gaming over the internet. It's not quite as fraught as the bonkers split about mask-wearing but it seems to run deep. The other day we had a player drop out of our game. As he put it:

"The whole Zoom thing is a pain. I just don't enjoy sitting in front of the screen, trying to get a word in, moving a marker around on a map, or waiting for the referee to come back when he's got several private messages to deal with. I much prefer the snacks and drinks, the face to face interaction, and the quick 'can I have a word'. It feels more real like that somehow."

Until recently I was playing in two online RPG campaigns, one on Zoom with Roll20 for dice and maps, the other audio-only on Discord. Of course there are good and bad points. I rarely bother with a full tactical map, but in Roll20 it's harder to do a quick sketch to show where everybody is. (Do please point me at some good software for that if you know of any.) As for the Discord campaign, I loved it but we did benefit from having stripped-down rules and a brilliant referee in charge. It wouldn't work so well with a complicated game system and lots of dice rolls. Also my private gripe about Discord is that it was designed as a chatroom; players who miss having visuals will comment on the action by posting cartoons and movie stills, which runs against the immersiveness of pure audio. If there was a way to turn off that legacy feature and go full theatre of the mind it would be perfect -- at least for those of us who are radio hams in spirit.

Our disaffected player's point about snacks and drinks was interesting. I like having friends round for dinner. Also I like gaming. I don't much like mixing the two. One of the great things about gaming during lockdown was that we can jump in, play for three hours, and say goodnight. Nice and focused. No need to eat supper, stow everyone's coats and bags, clear a metric pileup of crisp packets and wine bottles off the table, and so on. Admittedly Zoom and Discord aren't so good for dinner parties but, hey, you can't have everything.

If anything the quick 'can I have a word' is much easier online. You can set up breakout rooms in both Zoom and Discord and it's easy to pop over to those for a private chat. Around a table, everybody has to get up, squeeze round, avoid tripping over other players' scattered belongings... You could waste two minutes getting into the next room just to say, 'You secretly search the body and find nothing.'

For me, the biggest advantage of online gaming is being able to play with friends who live at the other end of the country. They could hardly ever make it along to a real-life session. Avoiding salt-saturated snacks and tooth-corroding fizzy drinks is just a bonus. So I'm in no hurry to get back to physical games. But what do you think? Screen or table?

The Machine Stops

I had no idea there were so many adaptations of E M Forster's 111-year-old science fiction novella The Machine Stops. These two student film versions, for example (above and below).



Those movies are both quite abbreviated, but at 44 minutes this radio dramatisation does justice to the story:



Or if you want the original Forster prose with no modern trimmings, try the audiobook:



Or you could go full purist (you just know that's my call, right?) and read the thing.

And why now? Because Forster proposes a world of extreme social distancing in which everybody communicates via the Machine (the Internet, basically). He thinks it would become a dystopian nightmare, requiring technological collapse to restore the soul of mankind. The reality is that, like most futures, it may not appeal to us Cro-Magnons but it will be the accepted way of life for those who grow up with it.

Not that we'd ever want to give up all in-person contact, sure, but there are upsides. Our roleplaying games have benefited because we now don’t have to travel across London to get to the game – and that's never a pleasant prospect on a weekday evening. So instead of two and a half hours’ gaming once a fortnight, we can now fit in three or four hours every week. And, pushed online by necessity, I'm hooking up with friends I sometimes don't see for years at a time. Even when the pandemic is really over (spoiler: that's probably not when politicians tell you it is) there are some good habits learned now that will be worth hanging onto.

"Only connect!" as Forster said. If only we could pop back in time and tell him about Skype.

Don't listen to Hydra

It'd be a reckless gamer who'd dive back into face to face roleplaying right now. Whatever the Red Skull says, the coronavirus is not going to magically disappear. Fortunately there are plenty of online alternatives, and taking the glass-half-full view I quite like not having to travel to a game during London's rush hour or faff around cooking supper for a room full of hungry gamers.

Here are Scott Dorwood of The Good Friends of Jackson Elias and Joe Trier of How We Roll with a smorgasbord of suggestions for gaming over the internet. (I'll append my obligatory quibble, which is that HPL probably pronounced the "dh" in dhole as an eth. So, not like the Asian canid. But I realize it spoils a perfectly good pun, so I won't press the point.)

In our games we've stripped it all back to Discord with the Dice Maiden bot installed for the rolls. Discord supports video now, but we stick to audio because it stimulates the imagination. After a session's over my mental impression of the game-world lingers as vividly as real memories. If your games involve a lot of tactics and combat, though, you might be better off with one of the other options Scott and Joe discuss there.

One of their recommendations is ViewScream:

"Three to five players assume the roles of desperate people trapped in a world of high-tech horror. A typical game session lasts 60-90 minutes." 

We haven't had any problem with seven or more players at a time (audio-only seems to help) for games of three to four hours, but I've heard several people say that online gaming works better with shorter sessions and smaller groups, so I plan to try it out and report back here.

In the meantime, don't go drinking any bleach, will ya? Take vitamin D if you like (it won't hurt) but there's no evidence it has any effect against covid-19. As for hydroxychloroquine -- no, just no. Though if you buy into that stuff and you have a few hundred dollars to spare, why not pick up a USB stick (sic) which, as any fule kno, uses authentic quantum woo to "re-harmonize" 5G radio waves. Between Trump's twitterings and barmy internet medical myths, the coronavirus has some pretty stiff competition in its quest to wipe out humanity. Your best defences are reason and evidence. So stay alert -- to nonsense.

That's been our public health information broadcast for this week. Come back tomorrow when we're plunging into a time of superstition, plague, violence and apocalyptic fear. No, it's not another current affairs post -- I'm talking about Legend, the world of Dragon Warriors.

A little touch of the apocalypse

Still searching for the perfect online roleplaying game? The lighter the better, I say. You can roll dice and move figurines on Roll20, but a conversational style of game is a lot easier and for my money more fun. That's one of the reasons I enjoyed running Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders, which quite honestly is a work of genius. If you've read the sagas you'll know how perfectly it captures the spirit of them, and right now it's Pay What You Want on DriveThruRPG. Oh, and Gregor is giving half of the profits to the Red Cross while the pandemic continues.

Two other games with a similarly light touch when it comes to rules mechanics are, unsurprisingly, both Powered by the Apocalypse. First up I give you Tremulus, which spins Lovecraftian horror in an improv storytelling style. I have a conflicted relationship with HPL-based games in that, if you play them true to the spirit of the Cthulhu Mythos, the heroes can't win. Having said that, going mad, giving in to despair, and suffering inevitable defeat can also make for a cathartic experience.

Then there's Alas For The Awful Sea, which appears to be inspired by Melville, Conrad, Poe, and probably HPL again. You play a ship’s crew navigating the remote British Isles in the 19th century. There they face a world consumed with suspicion, sadness, and desperation. Hard to sum it up, but the designers Vee Hendro and Hayley Gordon say this:

"Struggles for power have deadly consequences; mysterious disappearances plague the region; and those who seem human may not all be so. Amidst all this, the sea sends forth strange messages. Will you be the one to listen?"

If you liked The Lighthouse, that one's definitely for you.

I've been making some discoveries about playing online. Simple rules work best, but that was pretty obvious from the git-go. I'm also finding games run better when they're audio only. We have one game on Discord with eight players, and one on Zoom with five players. There's much more cross-chat in the latter, because any appearance in any player's room of a child, spouse, pet, pizza or whatever risks distracting several of the players into launching off on a separate conversation where they talk over everyone else. Lacking video, the Discord game is much more focussed. Players stay in character more and wait for each other to speak, so it's less of a hubbub as well as encouraging a more vivid mental picture of the adventure. There's a good reason they call this improvised radio theatre with dice.

Pop back tomorrow when we'll be jumping on the magic carpet for a trip back to the land of the Arabian Nights. Not just an adventure, oh no. Open sesame indeed, this is a full campaign complete with detailed maps of 8th century Baghdad. And whatever you're playing in these difficult days, and whether it's with voices only or facetime too -- stay safe.

Kicking and screaming into the 21st century

Matt Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress, which is used by a third of all websites worldwide - and a very good job it does too, as you can see from this one I made earlier. Recently Matt was talking to Sam Harris about how the future of work is going to be telecommuting. (Though strangely enough he seems to think that tele- prefix must be something to do with telephones... Neither a Greek scholar nor a fantasy/SF fan, obviously.)

You can listen to that discussion here. Matt should know what he's talking about -- his company has over a thousand employees worldwide but they don't bother with an office. The future has been a long time coming, though. When my last office job ended in the credit crunch, I resolved to go back to working mostly from home. The energy and time wasted in being squeezed onto trains for hours each day is just crazy. "The commute has had its day," I told business colleagues, little dreaming it would take eleven years and a global pan(ic)demic for companies to drag themselves out of the 20th century mindset.

It's never that simple, though, is it? Matt and Sam talk about the five phases of online working, which start off with companies trying to replicate the habits and work culture of bygone decades using modern tech, and then gradually evolves as they realize that distributed working is not a poor substitute for an office, it's a whole new and better way of doing things.

The podcast's subject is work not play, but there are lessons there for gaming too. We already talked about how asynchronous roleplaying could lead to richer stories than forcing everything into the format of a regular sit-down around the table with all the players. Here's another trend: the last decade or so has seen a movement to strip away the clunky mechanics of roleplaying's wargames origins and replace them with simpler rules that favour character-driven stories. Online play can only accelerate that. Tim Harford, who contributes the annual Legend Christmas special to this blog, has lately been prepping a new campaign for our group. The rules he's written are two pages long, and most of that is the magic system.

Even when the coronavirus lockdown ends (or the current lockdown, I should say) we ought to hold onto the lessons we're learning from online gaming. Don't get stuck in Phase I, like the characters in Forster's SF story "The Machine Stops". Instead embrace the growth that disruption brings, something that Tim Harford talked about eloquently in his book Messy.

Come back tomorrow when we'll be turning Japanese. Hence the video.

Keep your distance

My gaming group have been looking at ways to play online using options like Skype or Discord. I'm even tempted to do some play-by-mail. Why? Well, if you've been in the Negative Zone for the last few months, this will help explain it.

What do you do about dice-rolling in a virtual setting? Becky Annison had a good thread on Twitter about online gaming and her view on that was: "Trust your players not to cheat on dice rolls - it doesn't matter if you can't see their roll. What on earth are you doing playing with people you don't trust?"

I don't know if it helps anyone - but I role-play a lot and mostly online because I have small kids. I role-playing between 1-3 nights a week and I have done for years. This is what I know works to make an online game smooth and fun (1/8)

— Becky Annison (she/her) (@BeckyAnnison) March 13, 2020

Fair enough, although I'm sorry to say that in the past we had such trouble with one player cheating that I had to institute "the shield of truth", a ghastly blue plastic tray in which all dice had to be rolled. Thankfully that's a thing of the past, but if you're unsure then take a look at Rolz.

Playing online will probably reduce the amount of dice-rolling in your game anyway, which in my book is no bad thing, but if you really want the full rules-heavy dungeon-bash experience there's always Roll20, of which one of our group says:

"Roll20 does seem quite good for creating a virtual space in which we can visualize our characters. It would be enough, I think, for us to hear one another, see the rolls, and pass secret notes to the GM. We could add tactical map battles fairly easily when a particular situation calls for it. Roll20 doesn't have full integration to other systems like GURPS or Dragon Warriors so it would be simplest if we keep the rules in our heads and use the platform mainly as a communication device. We might even use Roll20 for the map and dice, while using Discord for the voice communication. The advice on GURPS forums suggests that most people use Roll20 that way, as a lite service for rolls and maps, keeping the rules, characters, and so forth offline."

Other options worth considering include: Astral Tabletop, Fantasy Grounds, Dungeonfog, and Streamyard. (And for board games try Vassal.) Some of those are full-on VTTs that include maps and dice rolling, others are just for chat. Have a look around to find the best fit for you. After all, you've got plenty of time for research.


But you could be missing a trick if you're simply looking for a way to replicate your usual tabletop experience online. Maybe there are benefits here that are unique to virtual play. For example, our group meets every other Thursday and that means at least half a dozen people travelling across London in order to grab about three and a half hours of gaming. (It'd be longer, but I can't get them to follow the Earl of Sandwich's advice and forgo a cooked meal beforehand.) Because we have such limited time for gaming, we've drifted towards a planned adventure-of-the-week style of play that's really not a patch on proper seat-of-the-pants roleplaying. The improv style of gaming is a luxury it's hard to make time for when everybody has jobs and family. It's a far cry from playing at school or college or in your early 20s, when it's possible to set up side sessions with one or two players on the spur of the moment, and the events in those sessions feed into the main weekly game.

If you're gaming online, though, it's pretty easy to recapture the sandbox, open-world approach. Each player is only a phone call away, and it's no problem finding a half hour for a Skype session involving just one or two players. That opens up a much more freewheeling kind of campaign, where one player might, for example, be sent as ambassador to a foreign court, and he or she plays that out separately, creating world events that will impact on the events of the main weekly game -- if "the main game" even means anything any more.

There is no substitute for hanging out with friends in person, but while the Sword of Damocles hangs over us, let's look for the ways that playing online could provide something different and just as entertaining.

The one-eyed god wants YOU

Just going to put this out there. I'd love to join in myself, but I wrote the adventure in the first place.

#RPG - Next Dragon Warriors Session: The One-Eyed God - Tuesday at the usual time (7:30pm UK).

Reserve your places now! pic.twitter.com/idTX3pvH4m

— Grímnir Mäyrä-Parta: Master skeptomancer & skáld (@Grimasaur) April 6, 2020

If you want the "Previously on Dragon Warriors" bit, it's right here. And, by Hárr the High One, the latest installment is now online here.

Life and death are only a dice roll away!

Only a dice roll away? That's never been truer than now for most of us, but while you're battening down the hatches there's no need to lose all contact with the outside world. My gaming group have been looking at Discord, Roll20 and Zoom for roleplaying and Vassal Engine for boardgames.

James Desborough ran a Dragon Warriors game the other night, and as you can see it's almost as good as playing face to face. Even better than face to face, perhaps, if your friends are scattered all over the country and find it hard to get along to an in-person session.

If you've been waiting for the right time to snap up all the Dragon Warriors books, Serpent King Games have them in a Bundle of Holding for the next couple of weeks. And I'm now talking to SKG about them publishing Jewelspider, which would mean wider distribution and more artwork -- which the proceeds of the Bundle of Holding sale will help pay for. See, there's always a silver lining.