It's hallucinatory, freaky fantasy, full of details and brimming with whatever new ones come into play. The textual framework for all the details is sketchy but imposing: there's a sprawling, immense, decadent city surrounded by seething trackless jungle. You play minotaurs, all of whom belong to a servant/laborer under-class.
Paul's goal is ambitious. If you were involved in Forge-related discussions ten to fifteen years ago (the Sorcerer mailing list goes back that far or farther), then you remember how most of us put aside the idea of the brilliant GM with his brilliant story and his brilliant setting, and play that was intended primarily to convey both to an adoring and thoroughly-obediently participating small audience.
As I've been trying to emphasize in the past few years, throwing all that out doesn't have to mean throwing out the 'brilliant setting' part. The trick is separate 'setting' from 'imposed plot,' which gets even trickier when you want the setting to be undergoing brilliant changes throughout play. I've written a hell of a lot about this in
Setting and emergent stories and in threads like
[Obsidian, Champs, Babylon Project] Incipient Narrativism and its discontents , but typically in those threads, I was talking about canonical/published settings.
So Paul's bringing up something that was skipped over fifteen years ago and not really returned to the discussion in the latest setting-heavy ideas and designs. Imagine: your brain is seething with setting-stuff, whether a draft of a map or a timeline , a notion of a social structure, a general strain or sense of the culture, or plain old disconnected brilliant imagery. You know that you could get this 'out there' in the right application.
Here's a game which turns that up to 11. Can you 'do setting' in incredible profusion whether in long preparation sessions on your own, in pre-play ramping up for the session to be held in a few days, or right there in play? It requires you to be creative and communicative, getting material across and seeing it get used, fostering a tiny subculture of fandom and reciprocal creativity about this setting right there at the table. ... And all of that
without playing God-Author about how the story turns out, and how the setting may change.
The players really have something to do ... as in really to do, not merely 'to keep them occupied.' But what that is, and what the characters become, is all completely viscerally determined in play, nothing to do with preparation at all, nothing to do with designated benchmarks or quantitative tipping points. Hell, there is one solitary choice made at character creation, whether your character is a leader, a philosopher, an advocate, or a soldier, and that's it. Here's the relevant character sheet. You don't even put a name at the top. Go.
Do characters get better at what they do? Yes. Do they have relationships and do those relationships change? Very yes. Does what they do make a difference? As far as I can tell, yes. But exactly what they do, and with or to whom; how they relate to one another, and why; and what happens, and whether that's good ... none of that is textually in place. It's
all play, driven by Color and the impulse of the moment. That's why character-play plot-creation are really, really hard to see if you just read the rules, and it's why this game is intended for long-form play.
Have you read Gene Wolfe's
The Book of the New Sun? Like that, even freakier. With minotaurs. This game is for people who go 'Oohh' to that and start saying 'what my guy does' right out of the gate.
The GMing techniques are nothing like those which are currently widespread across new independent games. This is a central GM who really does introduce and operate every instance of the back-story of the moment, play the NPCs full-tilt, and cuts and slices across scenes as needed, always. All play is descriptive of the current in-fiction time wave-front; there is no negotiation or framing or verbal set-up of any kind. Paul describes the GM as a pasta flinger, piling on details and events and stuff like mad (the weirder the better), from which the players produce reactions which can't help but generate further reactions.
As far as I can tell, and speaking from the experience of play, I think the GM would do well to initiate a scene with every character and have such scenes running at all times, so no one is 'in between' in terms of fictional involvement. This means doing a lot of camera-switching back-and-forth, rather than the My Life with Master model of running a scene per character per turn in a relatively fixed round-structure. It also makes sense to me to run a lot of Crosses as described in Sex & Sorcery, which is to say, not forcing characters' situations together through the back-story, but rather having effects of each character's actions be visible and occasionally influential upon another's immediate situation. Given the characters' shared under-class status, that allows for all the inter-character meeting and cooperation the players may want to have, as they see fit, through their direction of their characters' actions.
In our session of playtesting at Forge Midwest, my minotaur was the philosopher, and the three other players ran the other three types of minotaur: leader, advocate, and soldier. I think that first-time play is basically sinking into the whole swampy/stony feel of the thing, with some features strongly reminding me of Zero about emergent character creation ... specifically, that given both minor actions and reactions early in play, and with decisive outcomes in the resolution system,
your minotaur very swiftly becomes
this guy in ways that all the elaborate brushing-in of details and picky point-spending do not reliably produce in many games of my experience.
As for the resolution mechanics themselves, whew ... this post is getting too long. That combined chip-flip chart is genius, Paul, but at least based on what I saw and felt, I still plead that you throw the brainy guys a bone in the lower levels.
Best, Ron
edited to fix display - RE
