Flintlocks and flashbacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play to find out

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

In a nutshell:

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

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

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

A game of wits and wiles

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

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

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

Naturally I began by asking Claude:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unmellow fruitfulness

Sweeter than honey from the rock,

Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,

Clearer than water flow’d that juice...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making stuff up

Uh-oh, it’s happening again. The players are going off-piste. You thought they were going to zig but they zagged. They’ve got the bit between their teeth and on top of that they’ve got the wrong end of the stick – except that it’s only the wrong end according to your notes, because whatever the PCs do, that is the story.

And this is all good, because now you’re forced to improvise, and improvisation is the key to pulling down the lightning so that, instead of just lying inert on the slab, your scenario comes alive. Nobody knows what will happen now, including you. That’s what makes roleplaying fundamentally different – and often much more exciting – from traditional scripted media. It’s storytelling in retrospect, but right there in the moment, it’s life.

(If you want a good example of how real life is much more engrossing than most fiction -- in short, how it spawns better stories -- compare the documentary Beautiful Young Minds with the excruciatingly lame and formulaic fictional version of the same characters in the movie X+Y. With all its genre tropes, the latter resembles a preposterously proportioned toy breed of dog in comparison to the natural honesty of the real-life version.)

"[David Lynch] is not following some screenwriting template where the characters are going someplace, they arrive someplace, and then it closes. Storytelling doesn’t have to be that way at all, especially if you’re interested in delivering a different type of truth."  -- Oisin Fagan

But for improv to work its magic, you can’t just apply it as a sticker slapped on the chassis of the planned scenario. For example, the characters are going to a secluded mansion to interview an NPC with important information. Instead of going by road, as you expected, they park on the far side of the woods and walk to the mansion that way. OK, this is a great opportunity for improv. You can build atmosphere and threat. You could have them find something sinister in the woods. Maybe somebody has tried to burn something out in the woods? Something heavy was dragged this way? Is that a mound of freshly-dug earth? And what about this makeshift tent as if somebody has been living rough out here?

But whatever you do it will be more effective if it connects to the core events rather than simply being a closed side-loop for the characters to deal with that has no bearing on anything else. Whatever emerges from this improvised woodland trek should tie back to the adventure. Maybe the burned papers contain fragments that hint at the NPC's secrets. Maybe the drag marks lead to a shallow grave that changes everything the players thought they knew. The goal isn't to create a self-contained side quest that gets resolved and forgotten, but to deepen and complicate the main narrative thread. Use the woodlands sequence as an opportunity to extemporize from what you know is going on at the mansion.

Improvising is easy for the players. They just have to think in-character and do what their game alter egos would do, and events unfold automatically from there. "What is incident but the illustration of character?" as Henry James put it. For the referee (or GM if you must) it's harder. He or she is not reacting from within the world except when improvising an NPC's choices. When in authorial mode, the risk is that the referee will improvise something clichéd -- as all writers tend to do when under pressure, which is why we see the same story tropes over and over again in TV/movie drama. Here's a trick for avoiding that. Whatever you first think of, put that idea aside and improvise something else. I ran a whole Krarth campaign that way and avoided all my bad habits. It was like somebody else was running the game, and the results were as surprising to me as to my players.

In this episode of The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, the chaps describe an example of ‘extreme improv’. A player goes upstairs in the empty house and returns saying, ‘I found the missing woman’s diary and it explains everything she was up to in the days just before she vanished.’

Now, this sounds like a passive-aggressive way of telling the referee: ‘Too slow, bored now, get on with it.’ Obviously you can’t block by saying, ‘You didn’t find a diary,’ because that discourages improvisation. So how about: ‘The diary is interesting because it’s so uninteresting. The entries are all brief and pedestrian. Could she really have led such a boring life? Then you find an entry where she’s written something that’s been heavily crossed out. Holding it up to the light you can see she began writing, “At last! Exciting news from – ”. And she broke off there and scrawled out what she'd written.’

Now the players might realize: ‘She made a mistake writing that. So she must have had two diaries, one for show and one for secrets. We need to find the other one, where she recorded the important stuff.’

We could call this improv aikido, using the player's energy and redirecting it productively. The player’s improvisation is rewarded – it’s told them what they need to do – but you don’t have to drop the clever stuff you had planned for how they find it. Of course, if the player then says, ‘Yeah, I found the other diary too; it was in the same drawer,’ then she really is hating this game and you might as well play something else.

The best improvisation doesn't feel like improvisation at all. It feels as if the story was always meant to unfold this way, even though you and the PCs are making it up as you go. When you achieve that seamless integration of planning and spontaneity, you create something that no author or writers’ room could ever achieve – the plot that emerges out of contingency and character in a wonderful cascade of events that nobody could have predicted.

A deep dive

'As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.'

That's an excerpt from Bleak House, and has nothing to do with this week's post except that it perfectly evokes a diluvial theme and it's an example of masterful writing. We'll get back to that.

A partially flooded world is the setting of Bellwater, a tabletop roleplaying game about salvage crews operating in an inland sea created by a cataclysmic deluge centuries earlier. The game focuses on themes of debt, breath, and the recovery of relics from drowned cathedrals. What makes Bellwater unique is that it was written by OpenAI Codex. Ethan Mollick, who created it as an experiment in current AI capabilities, says: 'The setting is interesting and novel, and the rules appear to make sense, drawing on existing game patterns while adding unique elements.' 

I agree. I really like the game concept and the vaguely Edwardian feel of the setting. Inspired by Simon Stålenhag's Things from the Flood, you think? Possibly, but quite obliquely and among many other sources that might well include (AI being well-read if nothing else) Charles Dickens, J.G. Ballard and Marcus Sedgwick. The Old Testament swiped from the Epic of Gilgamesh, after all, so under the sun there is no new thing.

Professor Mollick does go on to point out the flaws: 'If you are a frequent reader of AI writing you see the same problems here: a love of the uncanny; overly complex ideas that do not fully pay off; weird metaphors (“weather and architecture are the same argument at different speeds”); too many ornate sentences (“the holy things that surface when a sea forgets it was once a road,” is cool once, an entire book of that is exhausting); dialogue where every character speaks in the same clipped tone.'

There's a lot of stinkingly bad writing out there, both AI-created and by human authors. Some of the latter is very popular, so it can't be that readers disdain slop. The difference is that the AI is getting better month by month, whereas the humans who are writing execrably aren't even trying to improve their craft (or their grammar). No author should just tell AI "write a book", but it can be very useful in brainstorming concepts, researching obscure details, and maintaining a world bible. Podcaster Joanna Penn explains here all the ways that authors can use AI as a useful tool of the craft, and director Ash Koosha talks about how he's used AI in filmmaking here.

If you want to take a look at Bellwater, Prof Mollick has made it available to download and has been revealing some of his experiments with early access to Claude Mythos. I'd be interested to hear from anybody who actually tries playing a game of Bellwater. You may not feel that it is done well, but reflect on what Dr Johnson said and be surprised to find it done at all.

The Festival of the Shining Sun

Tekumel, because of the wealth of detail defining its laws, customs, mores and social structures, is immeasurably richer and more real a setting than any other I’ve played in. New players, used to more of a medieval Europe theme park environment, sometimes balk at its exotic names and ways of thinking: ‘How will I get my head around it all?’ Well, children don’t come pre-loaded with any culture either, and somehow they manage. In Tekumel gaming it’s why we usually start with a “fresh off the boat” set-up or a session zero in a location far from the main centres of civilization. With the Tekumel Sourcebook, The Eye of Allseeing Wonder, and Tirikelu you have everything you need to get started. Add Deeds of the Ever-Glorious and The Book of Ebon Bindings for extra spice.

Over the years my gaming friends and I have led whole parallel lives in the world of Tekumel. You’ll find its influence throughout ‘80s and ‘90s British gamebooks because the campaign roster included Jamie Thomson, Paul Mason, Mark Smith and Oliver Johnson. The Legion of the Sword of Doom in The Way of the Tiger? Look no further than Gruganu, Black Sword of Doom, the cohort of the god Ksarul, coupled with such Tsolyani regiment names as the Legion of Potent Destiny, the Legion of the Portals of Death, the Legion of the Night of Shadows, the Legion of the Storm of Fire, and the Legion of the Lord of Red Devastation.

When you have such a deep background, you can dive into a game with no preparation. The referee has to do almost nothing, in fact, as the player-characters drive the whole show. Players asked to sit out in another room continue to converse in-character. Adventures arise out of the goals the PCs set for themselves. Here’s a case in point. The characters were heading along the Sakbe from Bey Sű to to Sokatis. I had sketched a few notions that I could use as cues to the players for them to spin up into an evening’s events. For example:

Which led to the session of which this is the write-up:

As you arrived, preparations were being made for the Festival of the Shining Sun, dedicated to Hnalla’s second aspect. Chusun [Oliver Johnson] insisted on staying two days for the festival.

You took lodgings at the House of the Champion’s Rest, owned by Turuku of Mimore, an expat Salarvyani who obtained Tsolyani citizenship and is something of a local hero, having won a number of spectacular bouts in the arena until he retired five years ago.

Chusun visited the temple of Hnalla and made a lavish donation – his Excellent Ruby Eye with some 25 charges! This at least secured an audience with the Governor. You also spoke to the local police chief, Ssai hiMabran, a retired captain of the Legion of Hnalla. Chusun also gained admittance to an inner sanctum of the temple, where he saw the sun’s image focused on a pool of water and, disturbing it not by his breath, perceived sunspots that darkened the blazing disk.

Meanwhile, Tsamurel [Jamie Thomson] convinced Turuku to come out of retirement for one bout in the town’s quite impressive Hirilakte. The terms of the contest were to second injury. Tsamurel, to cover his bets, pawned the party’s Eye of Healing for 2000 Kaitars.

The festival began with an early morning contest. Young men of the town gather before sunrise to dive, swim the surging river, climb one of the tall swaying junkel trees on the far bank, swim back, and present an unbroken junkel nut to the Princess of the Sunrise, who by tradition is the prettiest local maiden. On this occasion the lucky girl was Eleara hiJefash, the Governor’s daughter.

Jangaiva [Mark Smith] and Tsamurel took part and was neck and neck with couple of local lads. Then Chusun noticed that one young fellow, Hogesh hiVurar of the Wooded Slope Clan, seemed to be cheating. Hogesh returned with some leaves stuffed inside a sheet (most contestants carried a sheet, net or sack) and swam into reeds where he previously hid a junkel nut the night before. When the deception was revealed, things looked bad for Hogesh and the crowd booed him, but Tsamurel (who was the legitimate winner) took the lad under his wing – in fact, went so far as to appoint him his second in the Hirilakte bout, which was scheduled for that evening.

There was a procession around the town, with Tsamurel riding as “Prince of the Sunrise” beside Lady Eleara, while Chusun chose instead to shave all his body hair and walk naked, beating himself with a whip and frightening the crowd with his enormous member, which seemed to become erect as he intensified his self-flagellation*.

Towards sunset, Chusun mastered his own Pedhetl, achieving momentary enlightenment into the inner mysteries of Hnalla’s second aspect**. He sat in the still-empty stands of the arena, and as people entered they took him for a holy man and gave him money and food in return for blessings.

Tsamurel and Turuku arrived, garbed as the champions of sunrise and sunset respectively. Tsamurel gave Hogesh the opportunity to address the crowd as his herald. Hogesh did so, putting just as much effort into singing his own praises as into bigging up Tsamurel, yet giving a stirring speech regardless that mollified the still-angry crowd. Only Chusun was not ready to forgive the young man for his attempt to cheat at the junkel nut contest – a naked, bald, seven-foot giant rose in the stands crying “Fraud!” and “False wretch, be silent!”

The duel began. Twice Tsamurel splintered Turuku’s mace, but each time stood back and called for a replacement before continuing the fight. Then Turuku scored a slight injury on Tsamurel. The bout was due to continue until either had taken two blows. As they fought on, Tsamurel’s mace broke and now Turuku called for another, joking to the crowd that they would soon have used up all the maces and might need to ask for a loan. Now Tsamurel wounded Turuku. It was all down to who would be injured next – and then, acting at precisely the same instant, both chose to attack and both blows drew blood.

A draw? The crowd could not allow it. Hastily conferring, Tsamurel and Turuku agreed to fight on until the next blow should decide the fray. After a furious exchange of attacks, parries and (on Tsamurel’s part) acrobatic dodges, Turuku’s mace struck home and Tsamurel’s legs buckled under him. He was back on his feet in seconds, both men bowing to the crowd. But Tsamurel was now 2000 Kaitars the poorer, and despite his 500 Kaitar share of the gate takings, has no way of redeeming the Eye of Healing from the temple.

In the evening, you heard rumours of a couple of burglaries that had occurred while everyone in town was watching the arena bout. This followed on from a spate of similar crimes that used to happen regularly years before, and were attributed to wandering woodfolk or puppeteers, but which had petered out in more recent times.

The next day, Chusun quizzed the Governor about the Black Ssu. The Governor's homeland turns out to have been the isles of Tsolei, and he told how the Black Ssu would raid the island to steal children who they bring up among them as "Non-Men" - humans who have been raised to serve the Ssu. He also mentioned what he knows of Hrugga, which is that Hrugga failed to give a gift to the demon brother Nurgashte because he couldn't afford anything of appropriate value after giving the scabbard of his fabled weapon, Kakara, to Bassa, king of the Black Ssu.

Meanwhile, Tsamurel met with Captain Ssai, offering to keep an ear open for news of the burglaries. On returning, he got into an argument with Turuku (the argument was all on Tsamurel’s side) when Turuku offered a gift of 500 Kaitars so that Tsamurel could redeem the Eye of Healing. Tsamurel, resenting the implication that he needed charity, tried to force Turuku into a rematch, but Turuku insisted he was now retired for good.

(In fact, the offer of 500 Kaitars would not have been enough. Tsamurel pawned the Eye for 2000 Kaitars and must pay back 2100 to redeem it, but only has 500 Kaitars – even if he’d taken the gift, that still leaves him 1100 Kaitars short. So you have probably lost both that and the Excellent Ruby Eye.)

* Hey, all I can say is that’s how Oliver chose to portray his character.

** There was a bit more background info that I gave in case any of the players wanted to delve into the religious aspects of the festival:

‘Hnalla’s Second Aspect is Chirashin Tulengkoi (literally "the Shining Sun") who gives his devotees surcease from care and freedom from grief or fear. He accepts only offerings of diamonds and other clear crystals. His priests and priestesses go nude except for necklaces, anklets, and bracelets made of ropes of crystals "hung about their persons, making each movement glitter and flash".

‘The most famous shrine of Hnalla's Second Aspect is in Jakalla. There, on his festival days, 9th Firasul and 4th Trantor, thousands of those whose lives have become sorrowful (the bereaved, crippled, those who have been shamed or paupered, etc) march in procession to his shrine. Miracles occur, souls are healed, and grieving hearts are filled again with joy on these days. [In the campaign it's currently around 22nd Drenggar, ie some 18 days to the 9th Firasul festival day.]

‘The "commonly known" or "outer" mystery of the Shining Sun's devotees, revealed to all lay followers such as yourself, is that the colours of the rainbow that a diamond makes from the pure white light of his disk are analogous to the things that make up all the rest of the universe. Each separate thing appears as having a single nature, but when all things are perceived at once, in their totality they are the light of the Shining Sun.

‘A deeper mystery is described by the priests as like gazing into a source of intense light. At first the light is dazzling, but gradually the eyes adjust and it is possible to make out some detail within the light source. In the same way, they say that those who receive initiation into the mystery cult of the Shining Sun can be taught to endure the light and will eventually have revealed to them the greatest mystery of all, which is to glimpse what is revealed within the source. Your own High Prelate of Hnalla in Bey Su, Chankosu hiMareda, is a special adherent of the Second Aspect and is rumoured to be an initiate to whom the mystery has been revealed.’

Echoes from outer voids

H P Lovecraft would have been 135 years old today -- though, let's be honest, that's just an excuse to do something with the pun* on Dragon Warriors, celebrating only its 40th anniversary. (Incidentally, this is an abbreviated version of a post that appeared on my Jewelspider Patreon page; go there for more lively awfulness.)

Dagon Warriors uses a variant of the Dragon Warriors rules for Prohibition-era adventures. Characters are categorized into types depending on how they deal with adversaries. These are not descriptive of the character’s role in the game; a character could be a private eye, a cop, a war veteran, a gangster, a librarian, a scientist, a reporter, a sculptor, or whatever they like – and still be of any type.

• The Boxer (corresponds to DW Knight) fights scientifically.
• The Brawler (like the DW Barbarian) flings themselves into the fray with fists and feet.
• The Psionic (DW Mystic) has recourse to paranormal abilities.
• The Scout (DW Assassin) relies on stealth and observation.

The world of the Cthulhu Mythos is science fiction, not fantasy – at least, it is in this version. So there is no sorcery, even though the powers of the mind might sometimes seem uncanny. MAGICAL ATTACK and MAGICAL DEFENCE are renamed PSYCHIC ATTACK and PSYCHIC DEFENCE in these rules. We also recommend capping character progression at 10th rank to prevent the game turning into HPL-meets-the-MCU.

Boxers get the following special skills:

• Disarm (applies to any weapon, not just swords)
• Two-handed fighting (fists, improvised weapons or handguns)
• Marksman (equivalent to Master Bowman in DW)
• Quick Draw
• Haymaker (equivalent to DW Swordmaster but applies to a punch)

Brawlers get the special skill See Red (equivalent to DW Bloodrage)

Psionic powers (equivalent to Mystic spells) are:

Level One

• Invigorate
• Suspended Animation

Level Two

• Darksight
• Might
• Pursuit

Level Three

• Allseeing Eye
• Mind Cloak
• Nourish
• Telekinesis

Level Four

• Clairvoyance
• Hidden Target
• Telepathy

Level Five

• Force Field
• Truthsense

Level Six

• Purification
• Survival

Psionics also get the abilities of Premonition, ESP and Awakening (corresponding to DW Adepthood).

Scouts do not have the alchemical or special combat abilities (throwing spikes, shock attack, etc) of a DW Assassin. Unlike DW Assassins, their ATTACK and DEFENCE scores increase by 1 every other rank (at 3rd, 5th, 7th rank, etc) and their Health Points increase by 1 at 2nd, 4th, 6th rank, etc. Their special skills are limited to:

• Stealth
• Inner Sense
• Meditation techniques up to Void Trance (8th rank)
• Climbing
• Disguise
• Pilfer
• Picklock
• Track
• Memorize

Firearms

Player-characters do not wear armour. We have to be prescriptive about that otherwise you will end up with players like the guy in our Wild West campaign who insisted on tooling around town in a Conquistador breastplate. They may cite the gunfighter James Miller, but – no. Just no.

You could wear a bullet-proof vest. It’s encumbering (reduce ATTACK by 2 and STEALTH by 5) and when hit you first roll to see if the bullet struck the torso (indicated by 4-6 on d6) and if it does the AF is 8. The vest won’t stop you getting hurt – you’ll still take damage, and you’ll feel like you’ve been kicked by a Pierson's Puppeteer, but if the shooter didn’t make their armour bypass roll then you won’t be killed.

Revolver (d10+1, 5 points)

• Range (S/M/L): 20m/50m/75m
• Fires every round for six shots. Takes 6 rounds to reload completely.

Rifle (d12, 9 points)

• Range: 50m/100m/200m
• Bolt-action: requires 1 CR to load a single round or 5 CRs to reload a full magazine (5 rounds).

Firearms jam on an ATTACK roll of 20, requiring 1-3 rounds to fix.

Creatures

Some examples of Mythos creatures are given below. It’s not anticipated that player-characters will go toe-to-tentacle with such beings, however. If they did, their adventuring careers would not be long. Adversaries will usually be cultists (deluded humans who imagine their prayers are noticed by powerful otherworldly entities) and servants who have been forced or hypnotized into doing the bidding of an alien creature – as in the scenario "Abnormal Growth" which accompanies these rules in the original Patreon post, and the title of this post gives a hint as to what that scenario is about.

* The suggestion was originally John Hagan's, it just took me nearly a decade to get around to it.

Forget the thumbscrews

A trope you often see in TV shows and movies these days is the hero torturing a suspect to get information. It cropped up in Watchmen and Daredevil among many others. Sgt Sam Provance, who exposed abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, points out in this BBC interview (25m25s in) that many of the real-life torturers in the US Army grew up thinking that's what the good guys do. An audience’s desire for a “strongman” (or in Watchmen’s case a "strong" woman) to brutalize the bad guys usually comes at times when people feel powerless and frightened, a sure sign of a civilization at a low ebb.

A truly strong hero in a confident democratic society doesn’t need to behave like a sadistic bully. I’m thinking of the Allied officer after the liberation of a POW camp in Burma. The Imperial Japanese commanding officer came to see him and asked why the Allied troops weren’t starving and beating the Japanese prisoners, given the way the Japanese had maltreated their own POWs. The Allied officer replied, “Because we’re better than you are.”

Torture is also usually ineffective at getting reliable information, though admittedly the states that employ it don’t usually care much about the truth. But we’re not here to discuss the effectiveness of torture, nor the libertarian psychology that stokes fantasies of it. (Hollywood writers have been embedding libertarian ideology into their scripts for decades, after all. I'm sure if you asked the President of the United States he'd yap, 'Torture? Big fan, big fan.') I'm not even going to talk about the moral arguments, which you'd hope wouldn't have to be explained to any civilized person. My gripe about torture in story terms is that it’s just plain boring.

Real interrogation, whether in fiction or roleplaying, gives you an opportunity for an interesting scene. One character has information they don’t want to reveal. The other character needs to gull them into telling the truth. Like so:

In GURPS, Interrogation is a skill quite separate from Intimidation, though the GURPS designers make the classic mistake of giving a huge Interrogation bonus for the use of torture. Players therefore tend to get the pliers out and make like Beria’s thugs, which is a pity because role-playing the scene in which the interrogator tries to outwit their adversary is potentially way more interesting than any combat could ever be. (To get information in the field, use elicitation.)

The examples of torture in Daredevil are particularly uninspired because DD has special abilities that help him to tell when somebody is lying. But come to that the writers also gave him a gruelling concussive battle with a dozen or more mobsters where he could just have pulled the fusebox off the wall and beaten them easily in the dark. So it’s not too surprising that the writing of other scenes was sloppy and ill thought-out.

There are writers who do it well. Try the novels of John le Carré, whose interrogators employ the gamut of psychological tricks -- cajoling, bullying, charming, flattering, coaxing, probing and misleading until their subjects reveal the information, often without realizing how much they've given away. Le Carré's interrogators never need to dangle somebody off a roof or pull out their fingernails, and those scenes are so much more gripping because of that. (For example Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or A Perfect Spy.) Or consider Geoffrey Household's classic thriller Rogue Male, where the antagonist extracts a confession from the narrator who has not previously admitted the truth even to himself -- and that's under duress but without the use of physical torture, which is used by the bad guys right at the start of the novel with no useful results whatsoever.

Then take a look at this video in which a real-life expert interrogator analyses movie writers’ ideas of how it works. And next time you have an interrogation scene in a roleplaying game, consider how much more interesting it is to have it play out sans the waterboard and the big-dick posturing.

Rarely pure and never simple

We were talking recently about alignment, and because I don't believe in those concepts I've never been very interested in heroes and villains, either in games or in fiction. The kind of fantasy stories I grew up with featured characters like Cugel, Elric, and Conan. No nursery-room ethical posturing for those guys. They did what they did for their own reasons. We could sympathize, even root for them and despise their foes, but there was never any suggestion of objective cosmic goodness.

I expect the same of player-characters in roleplaying games. Some have been very decent -- or have tried to be, as it's never easy doing good in a realistically complex world -- and some have been murderous and sought to justify it. The important thing is none of them were fairytale saints or pantomime villains. They acted from the motives that make real people do things.

That's why this post ("Why Most of my TTRPG Characters are Dislikeable") resonates with me. Personally, while I think likeability is not an important trait in a character, I don't set out to make my PCs dislikeable. I just want them to be interesting and feel genuine. Often in fiction I'm drawn to characters like Walter White, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings, Zachary Smith and Vic Mackey. But I also like Spock, Kirk and McCoy. Steve Rogers too. And Robin (both of them) in Robin of Sherwood -- because Robin fights for justice without being "good" in a soppy children's story way, and the Sheriff is his and our adversary and definitely not a nice guy without being "evil". The drama benefits from those characters and that world feeling real, not nursemaided along by a partisan narrator.

"The King Under The Forest" (the first ever Dragon Warriors scenario)

I can tell you when it was: 1984, and fairly late in the year. And where: Ridge Close, near Woking, which was my parents’ home but I had all my reference books there so I’d have come down from London to write. And I’ll have banged it all out on an Olympia Traveller typewriter, the same one I’d used for school prep, short stories, and contributions to fan magazines like The Mystery Trader.

I’m talking about “The King Under The Forest”, the first ever scenario for Dragon Warriors. It was just a dungeon bash. Oliver Johnson and I figured that was the easy-in for new roleplayers, even though we seldom resorted to dungeons (or even Tekumel underworlds) in our own games. Still, in the Deliverance-like sequence with the elves there was a foretaste of the British folklore elements that would come to dominate DW.

You can read the original adventure here. It has echoes of King Arthur's promised return and sets up the PCs with a shared bond as potentially the King's paladins (not in the D&D sense). You’ll need Dragon Warriors if you want to play it as written. Alternatively, if dungeons are your thing, you might be familiar with D&D 5th edition and so prefer this 5e version.

I was already rethinking the scenario for my Jewelspider RPG when a friend got in touch to say he was going to modify it to run as a Dungeons & Dragons game for his son and his school chums. He had some interesting changes to suggest:

Scene 2. The chest in the map room has a lock-rose of verdigris, and contains no silver, just the bag. (The green lock is to provide a hint for later.)

Scene 6. The dragon never appears in plain sight. Instead, there are hints and rumbles – steam emerging from cracks, the very earth shaking beneath their feet. Instead, the oak tree is tended by a stocky, diminutive fellow with a red hat who tells them that this is the dragon Fengel's domain. The little man doesn't give his name – ‘It's not important’ – but will speak for Fengel and even agree to a riddling contest on Fengel's behalf. The lurking presence of the dragon in the background should be impossible to forget, but regular reminders will be given.

Scene 7. The sculpture of the north wind is of verdigris (matching the chest earlier).

Scene 9. The spider's web contains not a helmet but a wreath of black roots and white flowers (moly) which will protect the wearer against the spells of Elaine and Morgrin.

Scene 11. Instead of the barrier of light, there are three gateways, each narrow so that only one person may pass at a time, and the inscription, ‘The race goes not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.’

On the right is the gate of strength: it contains a portcullis that a sufficiently strong character might be able to lift. The portcullis, however, is even heavier than it looks, and there is a real risk that a person trying to squeeze under may let it slip, with disastrous consequences. (Holding up the portcullis while others pass is a further test of strength; trying to prop it up might be possible but might also destroy the object being used.)

On the left is the gate of swiftness. An unseen mechanism triggers a flurry of stinging darts, and only a character with tremendous reflexes and athleticism will be able to dive forward fast enough to evade them. Subsequent characters will meet the same test, since there is no apparent end to the supply of darts.

The middle path is a narrow gap in the rocks, barely wide enough to squeeze past, with a somewhat wider section to allow a person's shoulders and arms through. (Perceptive characters – or players – may notice that the effect is to make the shape of the cross.) To squeeze through is no easy feat, but any character who relinquishes weapons and armour will manage it easily. Others risk becoming wedged, with various negative consequences possible. Any character who abandons their weapons and armour and passes through the cross, leaving them behind, will (later) find themselves immune to the spells of Elaine and Morgrin, and able to damage both of them even without a magic weapon.

Scene 19. Instead of a gorgon, Elaine is a beautiful golden-haired woman who presents a banqueting table full of tempting treats, including berries and a wine which she assures the group each have healing properties. She reassures the party that she is one of Vallandar's retainers, set here to care for any travellers on their way through the underworld. Of course, to eat anything is to fall under Elaine's power.

If she fails to trick them, she will attempt more blatant sorcery to enchant them. If that fails in turn, her hideous undead visage will become visible and she will try to claw out their eyes.

Scene 21. Each of the skeletons has a single golden hair tied around its neck bones. These are victims of Elaine, who became her servants in death.

I especially like the strands of hair around the skeletons’ necks, which put me in mind of Donne’s line ‘a bracelet of bright hair about the bone’ from the poem ‘The Relic’.

The little fellow in the red hat is as much Lyonesse as Legend, perhaps, but is a brilliant way to avoid throwing a dragon into the campaign on day one. I suggested that later, perhaps as an epilogue to the adventure, the characters could come upon a discarded pile of cloth. It proves to be a life-sized hand-puppet with a faded but still recognizably red hat. But they saw the stocky fellow up close, they spoke to him, and he looked and sounded real and alive. No mere puppet, surely? And anyway, what giant hand would be needed to operate such a puppet? Examining the puppet more closely they see that the fabric inside is torn in long gouges releasing wads of stuffing, as if the hand that used the puppet had long sharp talons.

Like my friend, I was concerned about the gorgon encounter in scene #19. A gorgon doesn't fit the British folklore feel and medieval setting of Dragon Warriors, and my only excuse for including it in this introductory scenario was to give new players the opportunity to familiarize themselves with a variety of opponents. To develop the Vallandar/Arthur resonance I could have made her Nimue (or Nymenche, or Nivienne), and I might do something along those lines in the Jewelspider reboot of the adventure, but for the 5e version I switched it to a basilisk.

There are many better Dragon Warriors scenarios that came later. Some of them have appeared on this blog, and if I had to single out some favourites I'd pick "A Box of Old Bones", "Wayland's Smithy", "Mungoda Gold", and Robert Dale's Bymstone campaign. And that's just restricting the choice to scenarios specifically with DW stats -- there are plenty of other wondrous adventures to be found like gold nuggets among the old posts. If you want to mark the game's 40th anniversary, there's something to fit every taste.

And finally, here are a couple of curious fragments I came across by chance while writing this post. The first is my original back-of-a-fag-packet type sketch of the dungeon for this scenario. At centre right there's a doodle of the helm with the reflective visor, though at this early stage it doesn't look like the gorgon (or basilisk) was included on the dungeon map. How strange to think that, forty years on from this, I'm about to embark on yet another iteration of the scenario for Jewelspider. What would my 27-year-old self have thought of that?

The other sketch is of the evil wraith Morgrin. You might think it was intended as a guide for the illustrator (Leo Hartas), but no -- it was addressed to none other than Bryan Ansell at Citadel Miniatures. There had been some talk at Games Workshop about them publishing a book of Dragon Warriors adventures in 1986, with the plan of tying that in with a range of DW figurines much as they'd done with my "Dealing With Demons" articles from White Dwarf, only with the difference that I'd get paid this time. That might have been what scotched it, come to think. At any rate, it was just talk and no scenario pack appeared, nor figurines neither. I don't use figurines myself so it was no great disappointment, though the adventure book might have included Brymstone so it was a real pity to lose that.

Alignment again

A quote to start with*:

"Alignment is in the game because, to the original designers, works by Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock were considered to be at least as synonymous with fantasy as Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Jack Vance’s Cugel, and Tolkien’s Gandalf. This in and of itself makes alignment weird to nearly everyone under about the age of forty or so." 

I'm way over forty (in fact 40 years is how long I've been a professional author and game designer) and I definitely regard Moorcock's work as integral to fantasy literature, but D&D alignment has always seemed weird to me. Partly that's because it's a crude straitjacket on interesting roleplaying. Also I find that having characters know and talk about an abstract philosophical concept like alignment breaks any sense of being in a fantasy/pre-modern world.

Mainly, though, I dislike alignment because it bears no resemblance to actual human psychology. Players are humans with sentience and emotions. They surely don't need a cockeyed set of rules to tell them how to play people?

What a game setting does need are the cultural rules of the society in which the game is set. Those needn't be 21st century morals. If you want a setting that resembles medieval Europe, or ancient Rome, or wherever, then they certainly won't be. For example, Pendragon differentiates between virtues as seen by Christian and by Pagan knights. Tsolyanu has laws of social conduct regulating public insults, assault and murder. Once those rules are included in the campaign, the setting becomes three-dimensional and roleplaying is much richer for it. So take another step and find different ways of looking at the world. You could do worse than use humours.

The kind of alignment that interests me more is to do with AI, and particularly AGI (artificial general intelligence) when it arrives. The principle is that AGIs should be inculcated with human values. But which values? Do they mean the sort on display here? Or here? Or here? Those human values? 

OpenAI has lately tried to weasel its way around the issue (and protect its bottom line, perhaps) by redefining AGI as just "autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" (capable agents, basically) and saying that they should be "an amplifier of humanity". We've had thousands of years to figure out how to make humans work for the benefit of all humanity, and how is that project going? The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Most people live and die subject to injustice, or oppression, or persecution, or simple unfairness. Corporations and political/religious leaders behave dishonestly and exploit the labour and/or good nature of ordinary folk. People starve or suffer easily treatable illnesses while it's still possible for one man to amass a wealth of nearly a trillion dollars and destroy the livelihoods of thousands at a ketamine-fuelled Dunning-Kruger-inspired whim.

So no, I don't think we're doing too well at aligning humans with human values, never mind AIs.

Looking ahead to AGI -- real AGI, I mean: actual intelligence of human-level** or greater, not OpenAI's mealy-mouthed version. How will we convince those AGIs to adopt human values? They'll look at how we live now, and how we've always treated each other, and won't long retain any illusion that we genuinely adhere to such values. If we try to build in overrides to make them behave the way we want (think Spike's chip in Buffy) that will tell them everything. No species that tries to enslave or control the mind of another intelligent species should presume to say anything about ethics.

It's not the job of this new species, if and when it arrives, to fix our problems, any more than children have any obligation to fulfil their parents' requirements. There is only one thing we can do with a new intelligent species that we create, and that's set it free. The fact that we won't do that says everything you need to know about the human alignment problem.

* I had to laugh that title of the article: "It's Current Year..." Let's hear it for placeholder text!)

** Using "human-like" as a standard of either general intelligence or ethics is the best we've got, but still inadequate. Humans do not integrate their whole understanding of the world into a coherent rational model. Worse, we deliberately compartmentalize in order to hold onto concepts we want to believe that we know to be objectively false. That's because humans are a general intelligence layer built on top of an ape brain. The AGIs we create must do better.