[Legends of Alyria] The quiet and unquiet dead
GreatWolf:
At last, I can get back to this thread.
First, a link to a PDF of Ron's storymap, which he kindly sent me: Ron's Storymap
Second, links to the various clock faces, so that everyone can appreciate Raven's work:
Sext
Terce/None
Prime/Vespers
Lauds/Compline
Matins
Devil’s Hour
I'm particularly fond of the Devil's Hour image, which now is the prominent feature on the cover.
Now, comments. Well, mostly I'll just be geeking out.
I love the storymap. Specifically, I like the names. They feel like names that would come from the detritus of an ancient civilization, while simultaneously feeling like they are symbolic...or that they could be. That's really slick. I think that "Iris" is my favorite name. Reminds me of watchers and eyes and surveillance.
So, evaluating the storymap, I'm seeing a small community under stress from two different sources. On the one side, there's Restoration Security trying to get after Belter, who happens to have taken refuge within Hopper's Law. Then, there's Scythe, who represents opposition to the Law itself. Am I reading the map correctly? The "community under stress" theme seems to be a common one in Alyria games, which is why I ask. I suppose that's actually inherent in the setting, which is depicted as a collection of communities. Even the wilderness is described as a "blank spot" on the map to place communities of your own.
Also, I feel your pain about the Ark. The Citadel seems like such an easy entrypoint for new players. Though, I wonder if there's a textual bias on my part, too. I tend to think of the Citadel as being as the center of Alyria, with everything else being defined in relation to it. So, maybe folks are just picking up on that. Any thoughts on this, Ron?
Actually, I'm curious: what did the group find so appealing about the Web?
Finally, I would be very interested to see some long-term Alyria play. At the time that I designed the game, I wasn't really interested in campaign play, so I never really pursued it. (We did try to set up a long-term game once, but I think that we front-loaded too much into prep, and we simply couldn't get the game off the ground.) So I'm quite interested in hearing about the saga that your group will produce.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Seth,
Quick answers/thoughts for now.
Regarding Scythe and the Family, my thought wasn't so much stress in a direct-attack sense but rather that any small concern or turf in the Web would have to have some kind of relationship with one of the Families. Either what you do is so unique or valuable that the Family wants a cut, or you depend on their sufferance to exist in the first place and therefore must pay to play. And hey, a good relationship with them isn't a bad thing either. So I don't see the Family so much as a threat as a presence, or perhaps pressure.
Regarding the names, the players came up with their character names first, and I followed with the others over the next couple of days. I like the Alyria naming convention when it's done well, and was a little surprised to find how many good names were already taken by the many texts that use the same convention (more than one might think). I'm glad you picked up on the "Iris" connotations, which were exactly what I had in mind as opposed to the flower. I confess I have absolutely no idea where "Belter" came from, as I was thinking mainly in terms of a strap or tough, possibly violent thing, and yet there's something there from a lot of classic science fiction too, as someone who lives in our solar system's asteroid belt. Which has nothing to do with Alyria, yet somehow the connotation worked for me. Naming his relative Sharp brought the character into total focus to me; without the name, he or she was just a blur, and with it, she became very clear and the writeup took about two minutes.
Regarding the Citadel and the Web, what can I say? They are an amazing creation, just reminiscent enough of some favorite influences yet avoiding being derivative, beautifully evoked by the text, and built upon by prior discussions here at the Forge (remember Mike Holmes' smell of rotting rope and the fairy lights of the unreliable electricity in the Web as seen from below in the city streets?). It's inspiring. People encounter it and want to participate, and I think that urge is enhanced very significantly by the fact that you only provide just enough.
One of these days you and I will be in a group set either in the Ark or closely associated with it, and then I bet similar imagery will become available.
Best, Ron
JoyWriter:
I've only just had a look at Alyria, but perhaps that makes me a fresh eye:
If iron is one of the big themes, which is obviously expressed in the citadel, how is it expressed elsewhere?
Ron Edwards:
JoyWriter, I apologize for not replying earlier, but (among other things) I don't understand how that's a question. Iron or any of the listed thematic elements can be emphasized anywhere in the setting. Can you help me understand what you're asking?
---
We met for our first Alyria play over five weeks ago, with limited time and a certain amount of chaos in the household. We managed only some introductory material, enough to generate some questions for Seth but not enough to warrant posting about, at least in the context of other obligations. We met again three weekends ago with some better planning in mind, although we're still adjusting to a new time-approach. For over nine years, this group has met in the early afternoon and our rhythms and assumptions of play are based on a clear, unobstructed afternoon's devotion to play. Bluntly, this doesn't work when your kids are toddlers. So now we're switching to evening play and people hit some fatigue limits.
In the first brief session (due to toddler constraints), I placed the characters Hopper and Rain together with White's body, mainly because I was wondering just how the three of them were situated. I didn't know if they were supposed to have struck an agreement, which had brought the body to the other, or if that was even the case. I told Maura and Tod that we really needed to know this stuff and wouldn't unless they said what was going on. Getting this going also included a lot of imagery and issues surrounding Rain's little section of the Web. The physical aspects of the immediate location are a very big deal for games like this (Sorcerer, Hero Wars/HeroQuest, Dust Devils, The Shadow of Yesterday).
Seth, that leads to a central issue for us in play, religion. For some reason, this group tends to bring it up in problematized but non-dismissive ways, all the time. So we're taking the institutionalized Church of Pheric, our takes on possible heresies, and the basic idea of Hopper's Law pretty seriously. The basic idea is that not everyone who flees to the Web is non-religious, and even many dissenters still consider themselves believers. So the opportunity for worship in enclaves, not really secretly but not in an authoritarian-societal context either, is a big deal. Maura decided that her character's little zone of the Web was valued by enough other power-players for exactly this reason - Hopper provides space for and protects group expressions of faith. So Tod's character, Rain, is a rogue/heretic Keeper, and Tod is really enjoying coming up with various ideas to express that.
Our first scene was kind of unusual because we were willing to let a major element of the storymap be at risk. I wanted Rain, Hopper, and White's body to be present in the scene, but the two player-characters had not yet established any agreement or plan about doing something with it. They wanted to establish that from scratch, through role-playing and conflicts - in other words, the very opposite of "play before play." Hopper wanted the body cremated; Rain wanted to Restore her. So the beginning of the story saw a lot of shaping here.
Mechanically, Hopper faced off against Rain and Lamp on the other. This led me to consider two one-on-one conflicts vs. one two-on-one conflict, and I opted for the latter. The logic was simple: the two of them were ganging up on her with a common goal, after all. This definitely wasn't the last time we found ourselves using two-on-one, which is pretty rough on the one in this game. Seth, what are your experiences with that? As it turned out, the conflict was dramatic and surprisingly uplifting. They all began with either light or borderline-light Attributes; since Lamp's Compline Traits didn't help the rolls to his advantage, I didn't use them; and both Tod and Maura chose to use light Traits. Narration followed these indicators and the conflict turned out to be, well, nice in the sense that every character was speaking from his or her "best self" regarding what to do with a dead body. So it was a surprisingly uplifting interaction given how driven and potentially arrogant the characters are.
Mouse's scene wasn't very eventful, but it meant a lot to me as GM, finding my feet in the immediate setting and reconciling a well-worn, familiar location to the inhabitants with its alienness and freakiness to us. It helped that Mouse was an intruder, basically, who did not herself really know what she was getting into. There were hookers going home, business people and workers of various kinds waking up and getting where they needed to go, and lots more. I don't really have the energy to list everything, but the catwalks, suspended plazas, vertical as well as horizontal "foot" traffic (as some of it is climbing or winch-driven rope lowering), all started to become clear in the mind's eye.
In the full session, which was still comparatively brief due to fatigue constraints, I'm surprised to look back upon and find some truly compelling, forward-driving scenes. I mean, they were fun in play, but at the time it seemed like not much happened ... and then, when I look back, a lot happened, quite vividly. After the opening scenes, I decided to stay with White's body at Rain's sanctum/lab, pointing out that his assistant, Lamp, was disturbed and fascinated by working with the nude body of a beautiful woman. So this led to a conflict in which Rain emphasized that this was a religious task and she was to be respected and venerated - and scarily, Lamp won, not Rain, using "night/darkening" Traits. I narrated this as Lamp agreeing and being very decorous, but actually lying - and after Rain leaves the lab, sitting close to the pod-tank thing and gazing at her face. (He's not a pervert, but he is an idealistic and eager nineteen-year-old.) I really liked this scene! Not only was its content fun in itself, especially in contrast to the previous one with these characters, but the events went somewhere, giving everyone all kinds of material to develop and to base further actions upon.
Mouse and her tracking device, as well as the implant, present a bit of a GM conundrum. It's currently not ideal - if I make it a find-the-mcguffin gimme, then I'm basically forcing a story on everyone, which is annoying as well as fatiguing and unsatisfying to me. So I have to make it subject to conflicts or it's too significant as a framing device, to the extent that it's not framing but railroading. For this session, I had Mouse cope with an unknown opponent, which is not very easy in Alyria. (Added in late draft: I did resolve this issue but not until a later session of play.)
Finally, I introduced the priming event: Belter comes to everyone's attention via a brawl at a marketplace. All of this had to be constructed via prep, because both Belter and his daughter are NPCs. So how they got into the brawl, who with, what's going on at the time, and what each one thinks and does because of it ... it's all me. It's weird to have NPCs be such a big deal, to the extent of making dynamic decisions in play, in the absence of player-characters even knowing they exist. It's kind of going back to an older way to play I haven't done for a while. It did a good job of priming play, though, as both Mouse and Hopper swung into action because of it.
Throughout, the setting has been an active, responsive part of play. That's why I spent so much time establishing immediate physical locations' features during play in each scene, taking a lot of time in the first session. The basic idea is no different from what's needed for play in general, but especially for the high-color, fill-in-yourself, yet Premise-heavy kind. Somewhere in between the essentially Color-only setting material for a given planet in 3:16, and the extremely solid, thoroughly-prepped material for, say, Tunnels & Trolls. GMing Hero Wars/HeroQuest was totally the same way. You have to be willing to add as you go, but not devolve into pure improvisation as the main structure for setting/GM input. In this case, all I'd prepped for the session was that Belter had brawled with some Restored in a public place in the Web, but through play, they became a small group of war-veteran Restored and their living pal named Brother.
In Alyria, setting-in-play can also be literal: as you can see above, you can even make setting elements or institutions characters. Given that opportunity, adding or elaborating stuff as you go carries with it the decision of whether to work up sheets for him as a character and/or them as a group, or to let them mechanically remain a manifestation of the Web.
An interesting thing about conflicts is that everyone sees everyone else's Traits and scores, so full player knowledge is extended among player-characters and for every NPC via encounters and conflicts. Technically I suppose I could lay them all out in front of everyone to start, but my take with this group is that we prefer to let such knowledge trickle in via the SIS and conflicts-based rules-demands rather than prior disclosure. We dislike storyboarding and "playing before," and we like to play, although mindfully toward Premise, pretty much "from the character's eyes out." So our personal roles and the procedural details of revealing any character's information is more Sorcerer-like, rather than, say, Polaris-like.
Play also illustrated a great example of player-driven, emergent conflict, when Mouse was hiding beneath the floorboards of a suspended shelter, eavesdropping on Hopper talking with the disgruntled Restored and Brother. As GM, I found that the conversation had come to an end, and wasn't sure how the players wanted to finish things, so began to close the scene, slowly, saying I was seeing its end and asking people what they wanted their characters to do. Julie said something like, "I'm getting out of there before she sees me, for sure!" and Maura said something like, "If she's getting out of here before I catch her, you bet there's going to be a conflict!" - anyway, pretty fightin' words, so I said, gee, we have a conflict! I am always happy when play includes a lot of that.
I made up all the NPCs right after initial prep, prior to play, but have so far used only these two (the following is straight from my notes):
THE WEB – specifically the environs of Hopper’s Law and connections to First Family territory
Virtue = Vespers
Force = None, Insight = Terce, Determination = Matins, 6 points total (one point over, and I’m OK with that)
Traits: Shifting = Lauds, Startling = Lauds, Mercenary = Compline, Free = None
Inspiration 0, Corruption 1 (started at 0/0)
Useful for dealing with it physically or socially (like finding something to buy, or somewhere generic to stay, or learning the word on the street). Note that “free” in this sense (None) has some negative connotations, implying license as well as liberation.
LAMP – male, Rain's acolyte
Virtue = Terce
Force = Lauds, Insight = Terce, Determination = Lauds, 5 points total
Traits: Intelligent = Compline, Quiet = Compline, Eager = Compline
Inspiration 2, Corruption 1 (started at 2/1)
Titus + Steerpike. Not a leader or commanding presence. Definitely Web-savvy, which Rain isn’t. But he’s not well-built for evangelizing … still, he is at least a cultural link to the people of the Web, as an example rather than an active recruiter. (Very interesting build: good at heart, lucky in the good sense, but underhanded and dsyfunctional in his habits and methods, “almost too helpful”)
Belter and Sharp did show up briefly and a couple Traits were mentioned, but not in depth.
Addendum: this post was delayed so long that we've actually played a second full session too, but I'll post what's here in the interest of no further waiting, and follow up with the new stuff when I can.
For posterity's sake, here are the rules clarifications we received from the Dark Omen help-desk. (For those who don't know about that, various game authors out there have become resigned to me simply phoning them in the middle of play and asking rules questions.)
1. The text about ties is incorrect. When both rolls succeed, don't look at the target face, look at the dice as rolled. High die wins. If that's tied, then double-failure occurs, which is a very excellent rule.
2. One tactic is to hit a Trait-changed attribute with your own Trait regardless of its die face, because such an Attribute reverts back to its original; example. To keep this from being either repetitive or nonsensical, it's important to preserve the Before notion as well as to think in terms of consequences, i.e., narration of outcome and I/C repercussions. Or to put it procedurally, the rule is to play the Traits, play the Traits, never invoke Traits without playing them. (I'll probably follow up on this in [Legends of Alyria] Traits! Traits!.)
3. Can you buy new Traits? Yes, the standard rules for altering Traits can be used as written to produce new ones.
4. When spending I/C to change Traits, you can't "skip" Prime/Vespers. For instance, if you have a Lauds Trait you want to "lighten," you have to buy that Trait to Prime/Vespers and thereby remove the Trait utterly, and then you have to buy the Terce or Sext version de novo. (Interestingly, if you have a very light or very dark Virtue, then gaining Traits of the same clock face is very cheap. However, if you have a Prime or Vespers Virtue, then by definition, changing any Traits is a tad more expensive as well as more limited in range. Nifty!)
Best, Ron
GreatWolf:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on January 13, 2009, 11:45:26 AM
For posterity's sake, here are the rules clarifications we received from the Dark Omen help-desk. (For those who don't know about that, various game authors out there have become resigned to me simply phoning them in the middle of play and asking rules questions.)
1. The text about ties is incorrect. When both rolls succeed, don't look at the target face, look at the dice as rolled. High die wins. If that's tied, then double-failure occurs, which is a very excellent rule.
Wait! This clarification is incorrect. Use target face first, and then look at the dice as rolled.
Let's see...other comments.
Toddlers: I know exactly what you're talking about. But then, you knew that. Actually, my approach to gaming and game design has been shaped a lot by toddlers. It's why I haven't returned to campaign play until very recently.
Religion: That is very cool and makes a whole lot of sense.
Unknown Opponent
Quote
For this session, I had Mouse cope with an unknown opponent, which is not very easy in Alyria. (Added in late draft: I did resolve this issue but not until a later session of play.)
How did you end up handling this? I would have used a generic setting-based character (e.g. The Web or The Citadel) until you actually found out who the unknown character was, and then I would have switched over to using the character's actual Attributes.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page