[To Playtest] Colonization of Qek
Eero Tuovinen:
Quite intriguing, lots of ideas for interaction and motivations there. The method you use for these is interesting, makes for a faction-rich game. Reminds me of Morrowind now that I think of it.
dindenver:
Eero,
I fixed the Enemies and Allies. Yesterday was super busy and I didn't notice I forgot them til late last night.
Yeah, I came up with this system as a way to force myself to look at the relationship between factions under a more objective light. Before I did this, I found myself either using old stereotypes (elves hate dwarves, etc) or trying "too hard" to go against those stereotypes. So, I formulated a way to find out what the issues were that were driving the conflicts in the setting and then codify the relationships based on that.
In the KOTOR era of the star wars universe, the Sith is an empire separate from the old Republic, their territory is beyond the outer rim. What I discovered when I used this technique in that setting is that the Republic Military and the Sith Military complexes have a lot in common, with just he one except (light side versus dark side). And some of the enemies and allies that came from that analysis allowed me to really come up with some unique campaign ideas.
So, this technique has served me pretty well. I just found that I have to do things in a certain order or the factions will be too formulated. Another pitfall is the alignment factors (i.e., Pro-Trade vs Anti-Trade), you have to be careful to pick one that is a more neutral term. Otherwise, you end up with all the good guys on one side and all the bad guys on another side. for instance, for this one, I tried using Pro-Wealth vs. Anti-Wealth (since Qek gem working is more about wealth and less about trade), but this did not work as it basically divided the factions into hippies vs conservatives. And while it was interesting, it was not very helpful as very few people do not want wealth.
oliof:
One more resource other than diamonds comes from Qek, namely some rare spices and plants. But I agree that this is just a variant on the same theme.
Contrasting Qek with Khale or the other way round also fits the original writeup, since it is mentioned the Khaleans think themselves descendants of Qek. In a howardian fashion, one could surmise the Khaleans either cast off the bounds of primitivity or they devolved into some kind of misconstrued decadence, with their festive days and internal feuds polarising the conservative powers and the destructive nature.
If you look up Yesterday's Heresies, you'll find hints at blood sacrificing walozi controlling the inner jungle from the steps of their pyramids, too. This might be an additional explanation for the outer Qeks' lethargy: They dare not move around and stirring the interest of the Powers That Be(TM) in the Qek jungles that grow into the mountains.
Sam!:
So, here are the experiences from Helsinki from a viewpoint of one player. Sorry for being badly delayed: We played the sessions in December, but I’ve been on holidays and busy with studies. Without any further excuses, here we go:
We played only two sessions, maybe about 10 hours altogether, so I’m not saying that the testing was throughout. There were four of us, three players and so three characters. One was an Ammeni sergeant, another was an Ammeni soldier of fortune and third (my character) was a Qek tribe woman. The game was focused to the Ammeni military base / colony, so my character was a bit in the shadows. Our characters gained about 2-3 advances during playing, so nothing much can be said about the direction of growth or change.
Also, as far as I know, we didn’t much follow the guidelines suggested in the first post, so I don’t even try to answer in the bullet points given there. We took the campaign idea, some tools provided for it and ran with that. What follows are things which we found out to be insufficiently explained or provided for our campaign. Not saying that you Eero should fix this all or that others would run into same problems and benefit from our experiences, but simply: here are thoughts from our sessions.
Oh, and sorry for some secret and key names. Cannot remember what they all are in English out of a sudden. Ask if wondering. Also, sorry for the excessive use of brakcets. I know it makes the text a bit messy, but I don't have time to hone the text.
Factions
Nothing much seemed to be happening in the jungle. There was no apparent conflict between the Ammeni and the Qek. Jungle was big enough for everybody and Qek families were pretty self-sufficient. We did create on the fly the idea of the Ammeni colony being a penal colony for those officers who have failed in the war between Ammeni and Khale. The actual soldiers were prisoners, mainly from a mine but also deserters and rebelling soldiers from Khale war, I recall. During the game we continued to deepen the divisions in the Ammeni camp. The mentioned sergeant was from a mine, where he had his own gang, Sledge. These were eager to take over the whole colony and, with the diamond trade and time, turn it into some sort of free port.
I created the invasion of bloodthirsty beast apes as a kicker for my character. This wasn’t too effective in the fiction, however, as families were quite self-sufficient and uninterested to form an organized chain of resistance and common protection. During the game we had a bunch of low intellect or animal-like apes (some animals and some ape-goblins) and a society of beast apes (strong gorilla-like goblins, which had ape servants and apparently also some past trade relations with Ammeni).
I’d say that in order to create more dynamic situation there should be more factions. Especially Qek folk remained passive. Even if they are supposed to be loyal only to their own family, one family might be practically slaves of Ammeni, another working for them and third actively working against them. Similarly Ammenis could have different approaches, like the military core led by the captain, who wishes to tame the jungle, the rebellious thugs seeking to escape through revolt and cunning (well, despaired actually) merchant trying to acquire the riches of the jungle. Then there could be also goblin apes, walozis and Shar-Tek to keep player characters occupied and producing situations for choices.
Exploration and getting lost in the jungle
The basic idea was that jungle is a dead-serious place for both Ammeni and Qek. The only places you could go to where places you already knew. For my character this meant a problem, when I wanted to find a place to gather cocoa. I wanted a larger supply, which would not require constant gathering checks or would remove penalty dice from herb lore checks for cocoa or would even give a chance to make the check and find cocoa (cannot remember which). I managed to pull the roll, but since I didn’t have free advances or time to wait till the new moon, I couldn’t tie the place. Therefore I didn’t have any chances of finding the place again. It sure made the jungle feel impenetrable, but it also made exploration quite frustrating. It’s hard to be a native guide, when the only places you can find your way to are home, a sea shore and Eagle cliffs.
As part of this, hunting in the jungle for an Ammeni was nigh-impossible. I recall that the player first had to make a check about finding any game animals, then another getting near them and third slaying them. The first one was of course penalty died, due to having only woodscraft and not jungle travelling (or whatever you call it in English).
Getting lost was just a consequence or a “bring down the plot hook” for the SG, akin to a refreshment scene.
Ammeni against the jungle
If the jungle was so bad-ass, it would probably devour the colony, don’t you think? It was clear in the fiction, that the colony survived only because Ammeni constantly shipped there new soldiers. Technically the whole Ammeni population would be changed in less than a year (though I don’t think we followed this idea in the fiction). But how does the game system show this? Or is it just the SG’s call when the wounds become inflamed, the food is spoiled and buildings collapse? When do the Ammeni run out of clean water, cloth and fresh bamboo spears?
Linked to this, how do the Ammeni make colonization happen? What kind of abilities or checks should the Ammeni player characters succeed in, so that they could adapt and become self-sufficient? In short: what to do, when Ammeni try to do something in order to purify the muddy parasite-ridden Qek river water?
Ideas suggested for this was to create the jungle as a side character against which to declare conflicts, make problems into effects which colonialists can overcome through successful ability checks or to have Qek folk actively sabotage the colony (again giving an opposition for conflics). The secret of incubation is of course one option as is also the idea that no checks can be made: the problem must be solved through interacting with different Qek groups (no-one is and cannot be fully self-sufficient, hence laying a source for drama).
Encounters with the savage
There were no bilingual player characters at the beginning of the sessions. The negotiations with the furious apes were mostly roleplayed, describing characters actions. As the soldier of fortune spent some time as a slave for beast apes, the player was granted to purchase the secret of Qek language. No problems over here, actually.
Keys
As was mentioned in the previous post, we only gained 2-3 advances each, so we didn’t get to buy too many secrets or keys. I’d say that the secrets bought were knots and the secret of Qek language. The keys... the Ammeni sergeant had the key of criminal (wheeling and dealing with his Sledge gang) and the soldier of fortune had the key of outcast and of glittering gold. The latter one bought also the key of smart-ass (xp for bitching others). My character had the key of family: personal (we had the conversation whether you can / must have a different key for every family, like “personal”, “parents” and so on), of tsafari and bought the key of diplomat (very similar to the key of pacifist).
I’d say that the only key that didn’t quite work was the key of tsafari. It costs five xps to acquire a knot, and if you happen to learn it from someone, you get one xp. It’s a better bargain if you make the knot yourself (get three xps, spend five), but since finding new places was so very difficult and binding an already bound place would erase the previous knot (thus causing everyone having the original knot to lose it, right?), it wasn’t really an option.
(All in all, being a tzafari is bloody expensive advance-wise, but so is being a three-corner wizard, so maybe I’m whining for no reason.)
Eero Tuovinen:
Ah, thanks for the report, Sami. Given that your character was the one most entailed in the knot and travel mechanics, a few questions:
Did you find that getting lost delayed or frustrated play, or was it an interesting constraint and source of danger?
Did you use paths? Using paths does not require Advances, so they are the safe and simple way (or the safest and simplest, anyway) of traversing the jungle. I'm also interested in this because I'm considering removing the explicit knot connection from paths - makes creating paths relatively hard if you need to have two knots for it; makes sense on the other hand, if we presume that any two points for a path to run between already need to be somehow significant for the path to matter in the first place.
Did you require characters to always find their way to a discrete "place" in the jungle if they wanted to do something specific? How did you determine whether some activity required traveling the jungle as opposed to staying put? Your example about gathering cocoa beans seems like a sort of liminal case to me - I could imagine running it with a simple food-gathering Ability check, presuming that suitable cocoa bushes might exist close enough to the character's current location that no real "travel" in abstract, mechanical terms would be required. I suppose this depends on how rare cocoa is imagined to be, but was the possibility of not tackling the travel mechanics on the table?
Would you say that the mechanics would flow better if you got more knots per Advance? Or would it be a better solution to create stories where individual knots were more important?
Did you get to use your knots for anything else apart from travel? Did you find individual knots frustrating, useless and difficult to learn? Should there be some sort of baseline Secrets that help bootstrap a beginning character? The crunch doesn't do a very good job of supporting a native guide -style concept, I agree; that'd require a number of advances. I'm thinking of something like this to help:
Secret of Home Turf (Area)
The character has lived his whole life in a particular patch of the Qek jungle - he is practically a part of the living roho itself, and there is little that escapes his notice. The character is assumed to know all knots in the Area without needing to spend Advances on them - he also regains all Advances spent on knots in the Area. Knots explicitly created during play by characters do not count for this effect. When an applicable knot is revealed in play, any other character who knows the knot may check Jungle Travel (R) to show that the knot has, in fact, never been taught to this character. Requirements: Three knots.
Do you think it would be a good idea to turn knots into Effects, removing their Advance cost? This would enable a character to have many more knots with much less experience spending. It would also lessen the ties Qek have to the land, as they could just get new Effects for new places with little fuzz.
As can be seen, most of my questions concern whether the knot mechanics can be used facilely in actual play. They are balanced mechanically, but that is not much use if the players find it awkward to make full use of them.
--
As for your question concerning practical issues of colony-keeping, Solar System is quite relaxed when it comes to these issues: if you don't have a character to play against, then characters just need to succeed in simple Ability checks to succeed in whatever seems reasonable. (If you're wondering what constitutes a character, check the last chapter in SS - I classify different sorts of SG characters there.) Perhaps the more problematic issue is whether something is reasonable; can the Ammeni even try to figure out how to get fresh water in the jungle? I suggest that the simplest solution is to always accept the possibility if the player asks for it and the SG can imagine the game continuing with the fictional consequences - if it fits with the setting and situation, then it's applicable as an object of resolution.
Also remember to not burden your play with unnecessarily many Ability checks. Often enough individual checks are enough to establish direction for the events - if you failed to find water today, do we really need to roll for it again tomorrow? Perhaps we do, perhaps we won't, but it basically depends on the local understanding of the fictional situation.
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