History or Archaeology

I have a friend (thanks Will) who is an archaeologist. We were discussing the difference between history and archaeology, which he summed up as:

• History is mostly looking at the past through textual sources.
• Archaeology is mostly looking at the past through material culture.

Neither is mutually exclusive, and obviously both have something to offer the other. I think we can apply a similar division to games, their design and the conversation (d*scourse) around them.

• Designers who are interested in games-as-they-are-written (or designed).
• Designers who are interested in games-as-they-are-played.

Personally I fall very much into the second camp, but I suspect being able to describe yourself as one or the other is a good way to improve conversations. A lot of time is spent arguing about the Truth of something when instead you could explain you’re working under a different methodological framework. Now you’re doing a cross-disciplinary investigation (or, ‘having a conversation’) and might be able to learn or teach or discover something new.

I think similar can be said about sorts of role-playing games - by widening the gap between different types of game, we can paradoxically increase the connections and comparisons between them.

Importantly, this isn’t a value-statement. Equally, it’s okay to not be interested in one of the categories - that said, deliberately engaging in the less-interesting approach seems like something worth doing time to time.

Of course, given how my interest tends towards earlier games, using these history terms is very funny but entirely coincidental.

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Making Your Own Sword

Imagine a system as a mine. Within this mine is ore. You can dig it up.
Imagine your game as a furnace. You can smelt your ore here, and end up with metal.
Imagine the page as an anvil. You can hammer yourself a sword from all the metal you’ve found. The sword will change over time. You’ll have it with you, wherever you go. With a good enough sword, you don’t need to go to the mines.

I could give you this sword, and you could use it - but it might not fit your hand. I made it for me, after all.

Imagine a book as a burial. I return my sword to the soil, where it will oxidise and return to ore. You might dig up that ore.

A mine without ore is a hole in the ground. The value of a mine is where it is, not the hole itself.

48.01 Iric of the Jar

A snippet from the forthcoming Wolves Upon the Coast update.

In the forest, a vessel is being prepared. It is a full 10’ across, made of clay enriched with ash made by burning the bones of Giants. Threads of gold and silver are woven throughout. Atop it sits Iric (3HD, Leather, Sword) clad in a voluminous multi-coloured robe.
To those who seem cautious or fearful, he explains in Norse that he has found this vessel and intends to await the owner to determine it’s purpose.
To those who seem mercenary, he offers work - the vessel requires a glaze of storied blood. For each Human or Giant Animal body with greater than 3HD, he trades one of the following:

• One of two fragments of chisel from lost Uruk, and directions for using them to cast Passwall.
• A set of platinum tongue-sheaths, and directions for using them to cast Speak with Animals.
• A head-sized lump of quartz with lights dancing within. Thrown into the water, it attracts a Sea Monster. The beast eats the quartz before terrorising the area for weeks. If exposed to a storm before being thrown, it explodes within the belly of the beast, causing 8d6 damage.
• Four of twenty oily, corroded brass coins, each worth 50sp. They depict ziggurats.

After 20HD worth of bodies have been brought to him, he casts Magic Jar, stripping naked and climbing into the vessel, sealing it behind him with a lid of gold. In a voice resonating from the vessel, he asks to be cast into the sea. In reward for doing so, he leaves them any unclaimed rewards above and his material components - they have left in his robe.

Iric is able to cast the following spells - in human form, he has the noted number of components. Once in the vessel, he transcends the need for components, and can cast all once per day. Animate Dead (1), Colour Spray (2), Hold Person (1), Lightning Bolt (2), Water Breathing (5).

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Invocations to a Flame

First ally to man and the enabler of thought, Mother Fire dances in the mind and veins.

Those born in or travelling to the uttermost East where the land is flat and the wind has teeth of frost still remember how to speak to Fire.

Those with the kenning may ask a fire to be born in their palm, may ask a fire to increase in size, allow passage, to jump incredible distances or to die.

When asking Fire for something, roll for Reaction. Modify this roll accordingly:

• Requests to increase, multiply, jump and dance are at +1.
• Requests to decrease, recoil and abstain are at -1.
• Requests to be born or die are unmodified.

Offerings can be made to a Fire. Only one of these may apply - a greater gift renders the lesser insignificant.

• +1 for a 1 HD sacrifice.
• +2 for 5 HD sacrifice.
• +1 for a sacrifice worth 500sp.
• +2 for a sacrifice worth 2000sp.

A Hostile reaction is a violent rejection, the Fire likely to bite or actively do the opposite.
A Negative reaction is a non-committal rejection. Further attempts are at -2 with this Fire.
A Disinterested reaction requires a Sacrifice, but no further roll.
A Positive reaction is an agreement to the request.
A Friendly reaction is eager acceptance. Further requests are at +2 with this Fire.

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Night’s Black(pill) Agents

During my ongoing game of Night’s Black Agents (NBA) we had a realisation. One of the player character’s strategies is the ironically termed ‘vamp-pilling’ of potential allies - giving them knowledge of the vampiric conspiracy as they understand it at that point. They’ve previously brought eco-terrorists aboard after their leader was turned into a vampire and went on a rampage immediately - they just had to explain what happened, the nature of the conspiracy came after.
The target of this specific conversion was an Academic, studying early Saxon culture. The target, and the player character, had both been born and grown up in Germany - and the conversation was happening on a German university campus. As the now-practised spiel began, it hit me - the allusions to a secret manipulator group, hidden in plain sight - using the good, noble institutions for their own dark deeds to subvert and control. The acquisition of human blood for their own, unspeakable rites.

It sounded like Nazi shit - the PCs inadvertently trotting out anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and substituting the slurs with ‘vampires’. Blood libel and infiltrators insinuating themselves into established power structures map nearly 1:1 with the vampires modus operandi.

Obviously, the NPC recoiled - but once proof of the very literal and real conspiracy was demonstrated, they joined the PCs in trying to defeat the conspiracy. This is a process they’ve repeated a few times, albeit in less detail in subsequent efforts, as they’ve worked out effective strategies for recruitment. The number of parallels felt uncomfortable with the explicit ‘real world’ setting of the game. I don’t think this is a bad thing as such, but given the political climate was a lot ‘realer’ than you’d expect for a game of super-spies vs vampires.

The obvious monstrousness of the vampires ¹ is a cause for just war. Published in 2012, the consequences of ‘just’ and ‘good’ and ‘humanitarian’ wars is not a fringe topic - the very real abuse of POWs by the DoD and the abuses of the CIA (explicitly one of the previous PC employers in the book) before, during and after the Iraq war were in the public consciousness. In media following this period, we can see examples of ‘justified’ torture - Zero Dark Thirty, or the electrocution scene in Taken ² - and ignorance of the realities of the incredibly low value of information gained through ‘enhanced interrogation’ - not the mention the radicalising effect torture has upon its victims and their families. One of the possible PC skills is Interrogation, and similarly makes no mention of the quality of intelligence gained this way.

NBA posits itself as a work of genre emulation and mash-up - but the uncritical reproduction of justified war against a monstrous foe, the ‘gloves coming off’ - a fantasy of total freedom to engage in any act against a foe so evil as to ensure your acts become permissible. You are even explicitly vigilantes, freed from governmental oversight.

I do not think PCs need to be good guys. I do not think they need to be protagonists - my favourite games have been about people in a world rather than protagonists in a story. But the framing of the book and the playing of the game have not felt like an examination of bad people, nor as a confrontation of such acts as they occur in the real world - it has felt like a morally pure playground for repugnant action, historically perpetrated by the intelligence apparatus of militaristic states.

To be clear, this isn’t a “cancel Ken Hite” post or something.

Wolves Upon the Coast Grand Campaign Updated

Now featuring ~150 hex fills!