Lunar Notes
Marshall Burns:
Inspired by John Harper's GHOST/ECHO and Lady Blackbird, I made Lunar Notes:
Page One PDF
Page Two PDF
I'm not as hot as John Harper with the layout, but I'm actually fairly pleased with how this looks visually. I surprised myself.
The bulleted lists in GHOST/ECHO were what jazzed me the most, so I emulated that. I actually had longer lists than what's in here, but decided to cut them down.
To elaborate on the gaming-related influences:
John Harper: getting this party started
Vincent Baker: dice mechanic in Otherkind, and Cruel Fortunes in Poison'd (which you can kinda see in the way that one Condition opens up opportunities for others to get into play)
Luke Crane: Shades and Tests in Burning Wheel; if you squint, you can see that the number of Complications in this is actually the same as the Obstacle in BW
Ron Edwards: Binding rules in Sorcerer
David Berg: a conversation about another project of mine (American Wizards) that led directly to the Complication/Interference/Danger schema.
Whaddya think?
I'm excited about it. Can't wait to play it. I also hope to see a lot more of these things pop up.
Seriously, I spent, like, two days thinking about this, and one day doing it. I am not a graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination (although I did narrowly escape a BFA for painting), and it still looks pretty. I'm handy with rules design, but these are just cobbled together from other peoples' and some old ones I had laying around.
My point is: you can do this too. It's easy.
My question is: why don't you?
It's fun, and they're cool just to look at -- that's two kinds of awesome already, before you even play it!
-Marshall
Ron Edwards:
To be included among the others listed in the references is really, really wonderful-feeling.
Best, Ron
Marshall Burns:
I'm glad you're not annoyed by how I dumbed down the binding rules to the bare minimum!
I've guessed from other discussions that you're a Tom Waits fan; are you into Captain Beefheart as well?
---
I've been thinking about what it is that I find so satisfying about these "Oracle games" or "Dogma games" or "modules" or whatever it is we decide to call them. I think I might have hit on it.
For those of you that haven't heard me blabbering on about it before, I got started in roleplaying with homemade games. This was because me and my friends wanted to play RPGs, but we didn't have any, and didn't have access to any. So, armed with only a cursory understanding of what they were, we made our own. Eventually one guy got a hold of Vampire, so that was an influence for him later, and I was also later heavily influenced by a host of old computer games, but, to start with, we had no idea what we were doing, so we could do anything.
And that "anything" was an awful lot like this, because we didn't have the time or references to do 100 pages of spell lists and setting history or whatever the fuck; just some assortments of notes, a few mechanics (maybe), and some half-formed notions and ideas, that led to discoveries in play for everyone, creator and other players alike.
(Later on, in high school, I became a system-monkey and started doing some quite rules-heavy design, but that was later)
You know what I'm thinking about doing with this?
Partly, fleshing it out slightly, to maybe, say, 5 pages. But a lot of that is going to be more art.
Other partly, making it a solid, more-or-less complete thing -- not by filling in the blanks, because that part's supposed to be part of the fun, but by providing procedure for filling in the blanks.
'Cause, I mean, the way it stands now, it's like, "The blanks need to be filled in. Who gets to fill them in?" In my group, we would have no problem working that out on our own. But of course it ain't gonna be the same for others. And, really, this is the only thing that stops this from being complete, as far as I can see.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Marshall,
I follow your enthusiasm for the form and the basic idea of the project, which actually found its first amazing public expression in the late 1990s on the internet. Individual nifties like Ghost Light (before) and The Pool (just after) were why Ed Healy and I started the (first) Forge, after all, to find and consolidate more understanding of just these things. In many ways, John's presentation is getting the indie-scene back to its necessary basics, away from some negative trends that had become evident by 2005-2006.
But to get to this particular item, Lunar Notes, I suggest stepping back from the enthusiasm, a little. As I see it, it's a bit of a mess.
I hope to illustrate this by contrasting it with Ghost/Echo. The pitfall in doing so is to imply that G/E not only does it right, but does it the only way it should be done, which I'm not saying. My goal is to show that the decisions John made about what goes onto the page in G/E, and what is and is not in the game rules themselves, and what is and is not established as SIS right off the bat, are considered very deeply. Whereas in LN, I think you're more-or-less channelling early 1990s expectations of 'what an RPG needs' for those decisions. It doesn't surprise me that you're phrasing what comes next as based on arriving at completeness. You don't need completeness to finish this thing in the most sophisticated sense of the word "finish." I think you need to strip it back and reconsider fundamentals.
1. Ghost/Echo establishes a situation, with extremely defined basic features: a team, a mission, a betrayal, and a chase. Some terms are given to use for loot and foes. The literal jumping-off point is known in substance.
2. Nothing demands that the characters be individualized except for the fact that they have distinct code-names. This is an example of so many design considerations at once: (a) deep psychological, tactical, and ethical differences among characters; (b) the absence of establishing whatever those differences are through lists like the typical advantages/disadvantages method; (c) no distinction among capabilities among characters. The net effect, and I maintain this would fall straight into the category of "this is how you play this and have fun," is the overwhelming expectation for players to display and thereby fill in those differences, based on what each character does decide to do in light of being able to do any of the options, in a consequential way as play proceeds.
3. The GM has a brutally clear and necessary task: do something with the Others and Places list. How does he or she contribute? By providing imagery and substance to those terms, as well as choosing which ones are most interesting (on a purely personal basis) in the first place. Notice how powerfully this engages the GM not as entertainer, not as simple plot-manager, but as fellow creative participant, again, as a human reacting personally to imaginative suggestions.
4. The rules are tremendously abstract. (a) Goals; (b) two-dice results no matter how many dice are rolled; (c) Danger, Harm, situational consequence (capture, bad position). And that's it. Absolutely it. There is only one single setting-based option, which is manipulating the ghost field. All else is abstractly applicable to any imaginable situation.
As I see it, and here I'm not talking about John's train of thought but rather my take on games and game texts, the phrase "This game is incomplete" is a gross lie, but a productive one. It's very similar to the same lie that serves as the promotional device for Lacuna. There is nothing incomplete about this text. It is ready to play, in the sense that every single task necessary to play is explicitly present. Saying it's incomplete (and believing it) is like saying a cooking recipe is incomplete because it doesn't come with a partly- or fully-prepared plate of food. The productive quality of this lie for purposes of Ghost/Echo is that it's making clear to the reader that he or she must now do the fucking cooking in order to enjoy the food.
One of my first attempts at design a while ago, I called "BSL," meaning bullshit-less, and I set up some stuff for dark fantasy with it. A friend read it and came back both impressed and baffled - "I tried to make up a character," he said, "but you can't do it without everyone getting together to play." Right, I told him. I was tired of buying what I thought were recipes and finding instead facsimiles of someone else's prepared and half-eaten food.
If I compare the features of Lunar Notes with #1-4 above, the answers I get are all exactly what I'd found back with those game texts that frustrated me so. No starting situation; the mission merely defines the characters rather than places them in action. (As an aside, "how I got my powers" is not a starting situation, although that doesn't apply to LN). Individualization through different paths of game-tactics options, with no less than four different sets of options, two of which are redundant. No mention, much less instruction of GM tasks, especially pertaining to the SIS itself (exception: response to resolution results). Highly specific, flow-chart style resolution with lots of options and lots of outcomes but a curious sense of "nothing to do."
I think you're using a form which requires a certain function, without the function. It reads to me like an early 1990s text sliced down to two pages but still retaining the can't-play-it, read-instead-of-play qualities. Your blanks are in all the wrong places. Again, the point is not to provide the same exact things John did, but rather to recognize that what he did provide is 100% sufficient for knowledgeable and immediate play.
So what to do? Well, what's the part that sings forth? The music. It's called Lunar Notes. Get it back to the music, and Bending, Floating, Letting it Ring, and Muting it. That's the fun part that goes so nicely with the lists of terms (which are incidentally too long; the effect is to feel sprayed-upon rather than being lured forward). OK, so what's "it," which is bent, floated, let ring, and muted? That's the question. The spirit-hunting is a distraction and entirely too superficial for what needs to answer that question.
I don't have the answer because it's your game. But I know that when I think your non-gaming references, it's not about "catching spirits," it's about cosmic insight and journeys that are wholly internal and external at the same time. Put Pokemon aside, and Sorcerer too for that matter. Scrape off the more-chrome-because-there's-no-steel stuff like the Talents. Think about why characters might do different things as opposed to using different ways to do the same things.
Best, Ron
Marshall Burns:
Well, yeah. This things are always gonna be obvious to some people, and not so to others. For John Harper, you, and me, it's obvious how G/E works. Some people didn't get it, as evidenced by that thread and a few others. John and I, as well as my buddy Stephen, have a grip on LN (and all of them are different but functional). Some people aren't gonna. That, right there, I'm accepting as a thing. It's there. The game is free, so I have no desire to make it accessible to as many of my target audience as possible; whoever it sticks to, and whoever it doesn't, is pretty much all right with me.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on May 01, 2009, 06:19:13 AM
But I know that when I think your non-gaming references, it's not about "catching spirits," it's about cosmic insight and journeys that are wholly internal and external at the same time.
See, this is really funny, because that's exactly where I was coming from too. For me, it's obvious how to use all of this material to get there. Because, context. I was working from three extant texts (one was Beefheart's, the other two were mine; I'll post them below for the sake of curiosity) and trying to point people toward the general idea of these things, via the material I was making.
Seeking spirits means something to me. Catching spirits means something to me. Having relationships with spirits means something to me. Being lost, hungry, tired, injured, dead, or having your instrument broken -- they all mean something to me. Having varying degrees of calm, instinct, flash, and will means something to me. Unique and deeply personal talents mean something to me.
Every term on the bulleted lists is accompanied by an instantaneous wealth of imagery, metaphor, myth, and magic to me.
It's personal mojo, to be sure, but some people will share it or enough of it to make it work. I don't see any way to cut it away from the personal.
Is there a way to make it such that it's purely a framework for people to insert their own value for personal mojo?* Maybe. It seems to me that you're suggesting that G/E does this, but I'm not convinced. G/E works for people based on a shared mythology, and it works for so many because that mythology has been very widely shared.
*This is actually the very problem I'm having with my American Wizards project. It's about putting various philosophical approaches to things in a ring and letting them duke it out with things like interpersonal relationships and getting shit done. Do I make it for the philosophies I'm interested in examining (which is why I want to play in the first place), or do I make it so that people can plug in philosophies of their own choice? The second choice would be more accessible, and also seems like less work, but sometimes it seems like the first would actually be more rewarding to me -- both to play and to design.
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