TW 1890: Setup

Last weekend, we held the first session of my Torchwood 1890 game. Having discussed the broad concept and rule system last time, I think it's time to talk a little more about the setting itself.

The year, as indicated in the title, is 1890. According to the TV series, the Torchwood Institute was established on the 1st January 1880, a few months after the events of the Doctor Who episode Tooth and Claw. As of 1890, therefore, the organisation has been going for ten years, and is very much in its early days. It's around this time that Torchwood Two (in Glasgow) and Torchwood India (in what was then Bombay) are established, which gave me an excuse to say that most of the pre-existing members of the organisation had de-camped to these new locations. At the beginning of the campaign Torchwood London consists of just two agents and a handful of staff. Both agents were, of course, PCs, with the remainder being new recruits.

One of the first questions I had to answer therefore, is where exactly Torchwood's headquarters are. In the TV series, the London branch is based in One Canada Square... which, as of 1890, won't open for over a hundred years. Where were they before that? I'd say that one of London's many abandoned underground train stations is a likely bet, and fits well with the Hub from the TV series. But, in 1890, there are very few of those around, and, besides, it wasn't the mood I was looking for.

Torchwood 1890

As anyone who has been reading the last two-and-a-bit years of posts on this blog knows, I've long considered the possibility of running a Doctor Who game. For various reasons, it's never happened, and it turns out that not all of my current group are particularly keen on the idea, either. But it turns out that I can get kind of close, and I will soon start GMing a game based on Torchwood. I have no idea whether I'll be able to post "actual play" summaries here on any sort of regular basis (although we only get to meet up about once a month, so it's not a ridiculous schedule, or anything). But I thought I'd at least outline some of the ideas behind the campaign here today.

The first issue with running a Torchwood game turned out to be the nature of the last two campaigns the group has run - with me as a player, rather than GM. Most recently, we've done Primeval, and before that, Supernatural. There is, let's be honest, a certain theme here, although it wasn't one that was particularly intentional (we'd done Call of Cthulhu and HeroQuest before that). The fact that they're all based on TV shows isn't really an issue, but I felt that the fact that they were all investigators running around the modern world might be if I made it three-in-a-row.

Doctor Who wouldn't have had this problem - alien planets, space stations, trips into history, it's all rather different. But Torchwood ran the risk of, in particular, being Primeval with aliens instead of dinosaurs. It's set in modern Britain, you're agents of at least some sort of vaguely official agency, and so on. Yes, we could have the characters be entirely unofficial remnants of the disbanded organisation, but that makes it more like Supernatural (only set in Britain), so it still didn't feel different enough to me.

DWAITAS: 9th Doctor Sourcebook

And, then, in 2005, the series came back.

But it had, of course, regenerated into a form notably changed from its former self. This was "Nu Who", and, fandom being what it is, there are still some who haven't got over that fact. Nonetheless, we are now in an era of the show more familiar to younger viewers, and, indeed, to many Americans. Having said which, while the series was an instant hit in the UK, it was another season or so before it really took off in the US, which means that the Ninth Doctor Sourcebook could well be less popular than the two volumes that will follow it.

Popularity aside, this book does have a couple of more immediate problems to cope with. The first, which has already been faced by volumes Six and Seven, is the small number of stories there are in this era. Indeed, there are only ten, less than that of any previous incarnation save the Eighth, and most of them are only about half the length of what had been the standard for much of the classic show. The second problem is the relatively tight story arc of the season, at least in terms of character development (rather than the superficially more obvious Bad Wolf thing). This makes it somewhat difficult to fit new stories into the era without it feeling more of a squeeze, something reflected in the content of this book.

But what do we have? Well, we start, as always, with an examination of the Doctor and his companions. Rose, and arguably Captain Jack, are the only real companions here, of course, and the book acknowledges that. However, Jackie and Mickey are included as important supporting characters, and there's a discussion later on in the book (in the Aliens of London entry) on how these sorts of characters can be used in campaigns - something that hadn't really been seen at all in the classic show, even during the UNIT era. Adam also gets a write-up, with the obvious caveat that he's exactly the sort of character you shouldn't be playing, just as his function in the series is to be the "failed companion" that helps to highlight the significance of the real ones.

DWAITAS: 8th Doctor Sourcebook

The Eighth Doctor Sourcebook was always going to be the hardest of the series to write, and the one that was going to be least like all the others. The problem is obvious: at the time it was commissioned, the 8th Doctor only had one televised story, namely the 1996 TV movie. Since then, we have also had the seven minute webcast The Night of the Doctor, but that leaves a grand total of one-and-a-half stories to cover, neither of which give us much to extrapolate from.

One of the first things you note about the sourcebook is that the cover image, and most of the larger stills inside, come from The Night of the Doctor, not from the much longer TV movie. This is, it has to be said, reflected in a lot of the content, too, where the author shows far more interest in those seven minutes than in anything that happened in the other 85. He may not be alone among fans in that respect, mind you, and  it's not as if the TV movie fits terribly well into the overall picture of Doctor Who...

In fact, the book spends just 30 pages on the the actual subject of the 8th Doctor and his adventures. And, frankly, it needs a bit of padding to get that far. The book opens with a chapter on the Doctor and his companions, and here we see the first problem that the authors had to contend with: the 8th Doctor doesn't really have any televised companions. True, Grace fills that role in the TV movie, but she doesn't travel with him at the end of it, so she's really no more a companion than Ray in Delta and the Bannermen or Christina de Souza in Planet of the Dead. Still, for lack of anybody else, the book treats her as if she is a companion, and throws in Chang Lee and Cass (from The Night of the Doctor) for good measure. It makes an effort to explain how the latter could become a companion in an alternate timeline (for legal reasons, it can't do the same for Grace), but in the end, it has to concede that none of them really count.

DWAITAS: 7th Doctor Sourcebook

And so, with this sourcebook, we reach the end of the classic era of Doctor Who. The broad fan consensus on this era is that, at least in its last two seasons, it marked a significant improvement over the era that preceded it. While, for some, that might be merely damning with faint praise, there are many who regard it as a true return to form, albeit one that came far too late to stave off the threat of cancellation. Because, frankly, by this point, most of the audience had already left.

But with a sourcebook like this, published so long after the fact, that's no longer an issue. A more significant problem, perhaps, is one that this volume shares with the Sixth Doctor Sourcebook, and, looking ahead, with that for the Ninth: the Seventh Doctor only has twelve stories, just one more than his immediate predecessor. Which makes it tougher to find enough to say to fill the book out.

And, yes, as we might expect, the entries on the individual stories are considerably longer than they were in volumes prior to #6 - about twice as long, on average, as those in the first three volumes. However, on the positive side, it also means that this book has room for quite a lot of discussion on the general themes of the era, and for the background to what's going on in these last dozen stories.

The book begins, as usual, with descriptions of the Doctor and his companions. Somewhat oddly, Sabalom Glitz is in this chapter alongside the genuine companions. It's true enough that he fills a somewhat companion-like role in his one adventure with the Seventh Doctor, but, still, it is only one, and he was in two with the Sixth Doctor. Anyway, players should note that this is a proper PC version of the character, not the NPC one from the previous book - a difference marked largely by a full set of Story Points, although there are some other improvements, too.

DWAITAS 6th Doctor Sourcebook

Okay, it's confession time: the Sixth Doctor's era is my least favourite in all of Doctor Who.

Nor am I alone in this. While the Sixth Doctor does have his fans, they aren't terribly numerous. His run of stories are generally reckoned to be amongst the weakest in the show's history, rising to the level of mediocrity once or twice, but more often falling short of such a target. Indeed, while I am sure there are those who will disagree, I'd argue that they're the only two seasons in the entire run that haven't included even one story I could honestly call 'good'. For that matter, by popular acclaim, the single worst Doctor Who story ever broadcast is the Sixth Doctor's debut, The Twin Dilemma.

I am, of course, compelled by the Sacred and Unwritten Rules of Fandom, on pain of being banished to the Planet of the Ming-Mongs, or some such, to follow that up with "...but he's a lot better in the audios." That caveat is, it seems, as mandatory as it is true, but, sadly it's not relevant here. Since, of course, Cubicle 7's license doesn't extend beyond the TV series itself, and the best they can do is make oblique references to the spin-off material. (Which they do, for example, on p.22)

At any rate, I wasn't exactly bursting with excitement to read this particular instalment of the DWAITAS Sourcebooks. Yet, when you think about it, this book does have two advantages that it's predecessors didn't. Perhaps the more obvious of these is that the Sixth Doctor only has eleven televised stories. With Cubicle 7 insisting that every book in the series has to have at least 160 pages, you should at least have space for a pretty detailed discussion of every one of them. The downside of this, though, is that you're in danger of resorting to spurious padding to try and fill the page count up.

DWAITAS 5th Doctor Sourcebook

You're never going to get the whole of Doctor Who fandom to agree on when, or, for that matter, even if, classic Doctor Who "jumped the shark" and was irretrievably no-longer-as-good-as-it-used-to-be. But there seem to be at least three popular suggestions. Perhaps it was The Invisible Enemy, shortly after Philip Hinchcliffe was ditched as showrunner (or 'producer', as it was then). Or maybe The Leisure Hive, after Hinchcliffe's replacement left. Or perhaps The Twin Dilemma, a few more seasons down the line.

There are, of course, other possibilities, but the thing to notice about the three I've listed is that two of them doom the whole of Peter Davison's run to post-shark-jumping oblivion. A lot of people just aren't very keen on '80s Doctor Who, and how it sometimes seemed to be just treading water, and looking a bit naff.

But then again...

A lot of fans first came to Doctor Who in the '80s, and, numerically, there were more of them starting in Davison's era than in the two that followed. For many fans of the right age, Davison is "their Doctor", and fondly remembered. Astonishingly, on the fanfic site A Teaspoon and an Open Mind, there are actually more stories featuring the Fifth Doctor than any other of the classic era - even supposed fan favourite Tom Baker. (And most of them aren't pervy, in case you're wondering if that's the reason). Furthermore, the Fifth Doctor story The Caves of Androzani is frequently voted the single most popular story of the entire classic run, even managing to beat the likes of Genesis of the Daleks and The City of Death.

DWAITAS: 4th Doctor Sourcebook

The Fourth Doctor Sourcebook was always going to be the most challenging for Cubicle 7 to pull off, at least among the first seven of the series. There are a number of reasons for this, starting with the simple observation that there are far more televised stories for this era than for any other. Each of the first three books spent an average of about four and a half pages per story, filling out the remainder of the 160 pages available with a broader overview and rules.

The 4th Doctor has 41 televised stories: you can immediately see why the arithmetic there is going to pose a problem.

Many multi-volume guidebooks of Doctor Who history have addressed this issue by splitting the era between two volumes. Cubicle 7, however, have taken the approach of just giving us more. This volume is a full 256 pages, over half again the length of the others. It's also noticeably jam-packed with content to an even greater extent than in the three we've already seen. 

However, sheer length alone is not the only problem with bringing the 4th Doctor era to life. The audience is likely to be demanding, since this era is widely acknowledged as the best and most popular of the entire classic run. In polls to determine people's "favourite Doctor", only the 10th regularly offers up any challenge (and which of the two comes out on top largely depends on the demographics of your poll respondents). Looking specifically at the classic era, polls of "favourite DW stories" are dominated by Tom Baker, with over half of the entries in any top ten typically coming from this period.

DWAITAS: 3rd Doctor Sourcebook

With the third in the series of past Doctor sourcebooks, we reach an era that is, perhaps, one of the most distinctive, quite different in many ways from those that preceded and followed it. It's also, and for much the same reason, rather controversial. For many fans, especially those who were watching in the early '70s, the Third Doctor is their favourite, yet, for many others, the nature of the stories in this era is just too different to really enjoy in the same way as those that came later.

From the point of view of a sourcebook, this is actually something of an advantage. Because the era is unique, there's quite a lot to say about it. It may also help that much of what makes the Third Doctor's tenure different also makes it closer to traditional roleplaying games. It's perhaps easier, for instance, to see how Spearhead from Space could be made into a straightforward roleplaying adventure than more character-driven tales such as The Girl Who Waited.

The most obvious thing that stands out about the era is that over half of the stories are set primarily in the present day, perhaps with a brief excursion elsewhere for a couple of episodes. But there's more to it than that. The Doctor is, in most of these present day stories, backed up by UNIT, a military organisation, and - while he argues with them frequently - he is broadly content to work alongside them. It's hard to imagine the Doctor of Power of Three remaining on Earth for quite so long without going stir crazy.

DWAITAS: 2nd Doctor Sourcebook

The Second Doctor's era is a crucial one in the development of Doctor Who as a series. There's the obvious point that the regeneration itself, and the show's re-invention that followed it, are a large part of why it has survived so long. But it's also significant that much of what we now associate with the show originated with the Second, not the First, Doctor. The First Doctor's adventures, as I mentioned in the previous review, were quite different to what we have now, and often at least tried to be fairly sophisticated science fiction, with a focus on alien culture, moral quandaries, and the practicalities of surviving in a hostile past.

While there certainly are some pretty sophisticated stories in the Second Doctor's era (The Mind Robber particularly springs to mind), there was also a change in focus. This era became about monsters in a way that the first three seasons had never really tried to be - aside, of course, from the Daleks. Other features of the era that have since been commonplace include the 'base under siege' trope, with an isolated outpost menaced by hostile aliens. That's first seen in The Tenth Planet, the very last Hartnell episode, but it becomes much more common under Troughton, notably describing all but one story in the fifth season.

It's also the first time we have a companion joining for the sheer fun of time travel, and the last of the truly reluctant companions. In this respect, the dynamic of the show is also becoming something we more readily recognise today. It's also, for that matter, the first appearance of the sonic screwdriver. This, incidentally, is first seen in Fury From the Deep, a story in which it's only used to, of all things, undo some screws! Even in this era, it gets to do more later on...

This gives the second volume in the DWAITAS sourcebook series an advantage that the first volume could never really have. The stories here are more familiar in style, more the sort of thing somebody who'd only ever seen Nu Who (or, indeed, much of the colour era of the classic series) would expect. In particular, there are a host of monsters to throw into our own scenarios, where in the first sourcebook there were only Daleks and a bunch of alien cultures - many of which, like the Drahvins and the Moroks, look essentially human.

DWAITAS: 1st Doctor Sourcebook

A bit of a departure as far as my sparse and occasional reviews are concerned, I know. Not least because I haven't got round to reviewing the actual game. That's largely because I haven't yet had the chance to play it, and it's not really fair to review a game system you haven't actually used. I mean, it looks good, but how do you know until you get the dice out and give it a whirl?

But supplements are a different matter. I can't comment on how well the stats have been balanced, or whatever, but I can at least comment on what's provided. Also a bit odd, perhaps, that I'm starting with this one, given it's the fourth supplement to come out (although one of the others was a bestiary, where the utility of the stats is kind of crucial). But, hey, this is the way it is, so there!

Obviously, the reason for me buying this is that I'm hoping to get some use of it. I have some ideas for a DWAITAS game, and hope to put them into practice in the none-too-distant. Then I guess I'll know how well the rules work. The reason for me starting with this in particular, apart from the fact that it's hot off the presses, is that I have been going back through some First Doctor stuff of late, including reading volume one of TARDIS Eruditorum, which I reviewed here. As I was reading that - before this book was even announced publicly, I was pondering how DWAITAS would handle that era, and what material a (then hypothetical) sourcebook would cover. Now I know.

And, you know, the great thing is, this is almost exactly what I would have wanted. Pretty much everything that my random musings had thrown up along the lines of "they ought to do this" is here. It's a really excellent RPG sourcebook for this era of the show's history.

Pavis: Gateway to Adventure - Review

By now, Moon Design has a tradition of producing expensive, but hefty, sourcebooks for Glorantha. The latest offering, Pavis: Gateway to Adventure is no exception. At $60, it's two to three times the price of urban sourcebooks such as the Zobeck Gazetteer or Pirate's Guide to Freeport. But there's clearly a reason for that: those books are 116 and 256 pages, respectively, whereas this one is over 416. And, for that matter, the price compares well with the monumental Ptolus: City by the Spire, which weighs in at 808 pages and $150. (I'm ignoring PDF versions here).

Pavis is billed as the third part of the Sartar line, with the other two parts being Kingdom of Heroes and the Sartar Companion. Like those two books, it is divided between source material and adventures, with about two thirds of the book being taken up by the former. As the third in a line, it isn't intended to be stand-alone, and the nature of Glorantha would probably make it harder to port into other settings than, say, Freeport would be. As such, it's probably fair to say that this is aimed at existing fans, rather than the casual RPG purchaser.

Indeed, that's probably more true with this volume than the previous two, since, it is, of course, an update of the RQ2 supplements Pavis: Threshold to Danger and Big Rubble: the Deadly City from the early 1980s, and has obvious old-timer appeal. The new version is written for HeroQuest 2, although, frankly, that's such a rules-lite system (and most of the setting-specific rules are in Kingdom of Heroes, anyway) that, assuming you're willing to put the work in, the book is almost equally useful to someone playing some version of RuneQuest. Or whatever else your system of choice might be, come to that. (Well, okay, so something like Pathfinder might be a lot of work, but you get the idea).

Continuum 2012

It's been several months since my last post here, and it will probably be at least as long, if not more, before I do so again. (Although, on the other hand, I've got to review the new Pavis book at some point, so who knows?) Anyway, having just returned from Continuum 2012, it's time to post a review of that. Or, if not so much of the con as an entity, of the games I played, and what I thought of them.

To briefly look at the con itself, not only was it enjoyable, but, from my perspective, everything went without a hitch. I have not one complaint about the con, or its organisation. (I know some people moaned about the food, but I had no problems with it... one doesn't expect top notch catering in a student hall, and it was perfectly adequate for my needs. I'm there to game, not eat). So full kudos to everyone for pulling it off. The only negative points you're going to see in this post concern my reactions to individual game systems, and the like.

So, slot by slot through the con, here we go:

Kingdom of the Flamesword

Some of you may recall that, in addition to the Book of Glorious Joy, I was also commissioned by Issaries to write a similar book on Seshnela and the Rokari. That fell through, as ideas of what Seshnela should be changed. In the none-to-distant future, Issaries/Moon Design will be publishing the Guide to Glorantha which will include the new, canonical view of Seshnela, and we both agree that it's important for any release of my material not to clash with that.

There was a hope that it might be published in some dead-tree format, but that's all stalled, and I've had no reply to e-mails. So, since I do have permission from Issaries to post the material free-of-charge to my website (so long as certain legal disclaimers are included), and in the interests of not clashing with the release of official publications, that's what I've done.

If you liked the Book of Glorious Joy, and wondered what I made of Seshnela, you can find my thoughts in Kingdom of the Flamesword. As always, the non-canonical nature of the work must be stressed, and no challenges to copyrights or trademarks are intended - this is just fan material, nothing more and nothing less. It will certainly be contradicted in official works, and, if that matters to you, this won't be of much use. It's also worth noting that at least some of it was written for HQ1, which was the current edition at the time, and may put some people off.

But otherwise - well, hopefully it will be useful to someone.

Update: Kingdom of the Flamesword, updated to the current version of what is now QuestWorlds, is now available for purchase at DriveThru RPG, along with Forged in Blood and Snow, which does the same for the Kingdom of Jonatela.

Loskalmi Canonicity

One of the questions I have seen more than once with regard to the Book of Glorious Joy (well, all right, the only question I've seen more than once) concerns its canonical status. As one questioner put it:

what is the relationship between the Book of Glorious Joy and mainstream Glorantha? Are they letting you define Malkionism in Loskalm?

The simple answer to this question is "no".

But it may deserve a slightly more detailed explanation than that.

Commoner Cults of Jonatela

So, in my last post I discussed the reasoning behind the rule mechanics I used for Jonating commoner caste magic in the recent piece at my home page. As I said then, I can think of two other questions the piece might have raised in the minds of readers, and I'll discuss them now.

To begin with, if the Elmoi are supposed to represent a denuded form of Ernalda worship, and they really are theistic, which gods are we talking about here? I see no reason to stay being mysterious about that, and people might wonder, so that's something I can quickly deal with. It should be said, though, that I think it's more important that the cults are distinct, than whether or not the beings behind them are, so I don't think it really matters much. Which means that anyone else's interpretation is as good as mine - if I thought it was important, and made a meaningful difference, I'd have put it in the article, not here.

At any rate, Frona is, I think, fairly clearly some sort of aspect of Ernalda the Great Goddess. She's mentioned as a grain goddess in RQ3, and Thunder Rebels reinforces that the grain goddess cults are different ways of worshipping the great earth mother. Frona, clearly, is the mother goddess and land goddess for Fronela as a whole, and will have her own, regular, theistic cult elsewhere.

Uryana and Vilecha are also aspects of Ernalda, and remember, we're told in Genertela: CotHW that the Jonating commoners worship Ernalda as their main goddess, so it makes sense that she gets the key roles. I don't think of Vilecha as a Chalana Arroy, incidentally, because she's just not powerful enough.

The Magic of Malkioni Commoners

Yes, it's been several months since I've posted here. Not that I haven't been busy writing in the meantime, of course. For one, I have managed to write weekly posts at my mammalogical blog, Synapsida - and those do require quite a lot of preparation. There have been many other bits of writing besides, some of which may eventually appear somewhere for public perusal. But, on the Gloranthan front, I have also continued to write some fan material on Jonatela - what would have been LotW4, had the series not been cancelled.

The latest instalment has taken a while to appear, because its quite a big one - ten new cults, in fact. The next will focus on the wizardry schools and that, too, may take a while because of its complexity (I predict early September). But I think the latest one will likely raise a few questions that I think its worth answering here, rather than in the more formal outlet of the web page itself. The questions are:

1. Why did I treat the commoner caste cults as I did?
2. What, if anything, is their relationship to the Orlanth cults?
3. Why did I even bother?

Taking the first question first, we have to go all the way back to the days of RuneQuest 3. That was the first rules edition to address Malkioni magic in general, or Jonating magic in particular. The RQ3 publication Genertela: Crucible of the Hero Wars says, in the Players Book, that about 75% of Jonatings follow the Orlanth pantheon and gain "the benefits of a barbarian initiate", while the remainder follow the Malkioni religion and receive, unless they are professional wizardry adepts, some limited sorcery magic. There is no indication that - priests and adepts aside - this is anything other than random. That is, parts of Jonatela are Orlanthi, with all the magic that implies, and parts are Malkioni, with all the implications of that.

d101 Con

I've just returned from the d101 "convention" in Matlock, Derbyshire. It's not really a con in any meaningful sense, just a group of people renting out a cottage to do some gaming for a weekend. It was a pretty enjoyable weekend away, and it seems to have been popular enough with those who could attend that we may do it again next year, possibly renting out a second cottage to allow a larger group of players. My thanks go to Newt Newport for arranging it, but my main purpose for posting here is to ruminate on the games we played.

We started off with Action Castle, which, is basically a fun party game for those old enough to remember 1980s computer RPGs. This means we are all now "King of Action Castle"! Cool...

Being too tired from travelling to do anything more taxing on the Friday evening, we kicked off the RPing proper on Saturday morning with Savage Worlds. I've played this once before, but the game is a flexible one not tied to any particular genre, so it's not surprising that the experience was very different. That time, the setting was the old Captain Scarlet TV series, but this time it was a rather more serious sci-fi setting, with distinct Travelleresque overtones. I gather that d101 is planning to release this as a more formal setting at some point, possibly using the easy-to-obtain Savage Worlds license. The setting was a crumbling interstellar empire, with various different factions vying for control, including mad cyborgs and sinister telepaths.

Because the Captain Scarlet game obviously used characters from the TV series, those were all pre-gens, but this time we all made our own characters up on the day. Considering that few of us had any experience with character generation in this system, this seemed a remarkably quick and painless process, which suggests that Savage Worlds would be a good system for use at conventions where you don't want pre-gens. In general, its a pretty simple system, and plays quickly, and has fairly straightforward mechanics, perhaps with something of an emphasis on pulp style excitement. Here for example, is the character I came up with:

Lady Corinia

Agility: d6                    Guts d4                        Psionic Background d8

Strength: d4               Healing d6                  Psionic Resistance d4

Vigour: d4                    Investigation d8

Smarts: d8                   Notice d6

Spirit: d8                      Shooting d4

Psionic Powers: Obscure, Stun, Pyrokinesis

Edges: Mentalist, Rich, Alertness

Drawbacks: All Thumbs

Weapons: Engraved laser derringer (carried in handbag)

...which was enough to give me a reasonable overview of the character, without over-complicating things, or making it seem all overly generalised and simplistic.

In the afternoon, time for a game of HeroQuest, using the Call of Cthulhu setting. Obviously, I'm very familiar with both the system and the setting, although I've never seen the two used together before. In this instance, it seemed to work very well, with, for example, lingering penalties being used to reflect the inevitable loss of sanity that accrues as one continues investigating. The scenario, created by Newt, had the wonderfully appropriate title of "Normal for Norfolk" (unfortunately, if you're not British, the meaning of this reference may not be obvious). Since it was set in the 1970s, and the PCs were all members of the Flying Squad, the inspiration we ended up using was, perhaps, inevitable... Our characters were perhaps, not entirely serious, and we never really got to the end of the scenario, but I won't give out any more details, in case d101 should choose to publish it some day. At any rate, this was my character:

DC Bob Bawdsey

Drive Like a Lunatic  18       Boozing                 13

Shooters              13       Hate Scroats            13

Ignore Procedure      18       Plant Evidence          13

Streetwise            13       Blag Way Out of Trouble 15  

Boxing                13       Look Hard               4M

The actions of our DS (another PC) perhaps got a bit too extreme towards the end, but, being a con game, that was easy enough for me to ignore.

On the Sunday, there was only time for a single game of Burning Wheel, using the introductory scenario from the rulebook. Burning Wheel was once recommended to me (I won't say by who) as a flexible, rules lite, modern system with plenty of options for different ways of resolving things. Most of that seems true, but what would make anyone think it's "rules lite" is beyond me. Indeed, in an age where RPGs seem to be getting simpler, it has to be one of the more complex new systems on the market - although there are plenty of older ones of similar complexity. It's fun enough to play in, especially as a one-off, and it does seem to be very good at describing characters and fleshing them out, but its way too complex and detailed for me to want to ever GM it. I've run a version of GURPS in the past, but that was stripped down so far, that I consider it an entirely new system. Still, even that was more than I'd be happy with today, so while I have no doubt that Burning Wheel is very good at what it does, as a GM, it's not my cup of tea.

But, as a player, I had no problem with it, and it seemed to work fairly smoothly. I certainly had fun with the pre-gen character, who was a somewhat snooty and sinister sorceress. The scenario worked well, and it was an enjoyable game. I'm certainly glad to have tried it, and I wouldn't object to playing it again - so long as I don't have to run it!

The rest of the time was spent relaxing, chatting, watching old movies, etc. making it all a pretty enjoyable weekend, mostly with gamers that I haven't played with much before. Since this was a d101 event, I'll also add a brief update on Book of Glorious Joy: about two thirds of the interior artwork is in (and more came in over the weekend), all of which looks pretty cool. Things are stepping up, and I don't think its going to be too much longer now.

On similar lines, there should be further updates to my unofficial Jonatela material soon - the next one is quite large, which is why its taken longer than usual for it to appear. And, for my ponderings on mammalian biology, there's Synapsida, which has been updated fairly regularly of late. I'm not fully happy with all of the latest posts there, but its something I'm learning as I go along, and I think its getting better.

Just possibly, most likely if I can get something to run put together, I might attend Concrete Cow 11, but no promises there. As for cons later in the year... well, we'll see.

Thoughts on Ratings in RPGs - pt 2

So, earlier I posted about my recent experiences on providing ratings guidelines for an online RPG, and how they might (or might not) be more generally applicable. I touched on general issues of theme there, and I'll now look at how we implemented more specific guidelines, and what those might indicate.

Language
The use of strong language is naturally something that might concern both film censors and anyone involved in text-based RPing. Among a group of friends RPing together over the table, its likely that it really doesn't need to be spelled out, but when you have a larger pool of players, perhaps from different backgrounds, it can be a different matter. As with theme, this can be an important aspect of simulating a particular written or filmed genre - Harry Potter should not, it seems to me, sound like Pulp Fiction.

On the other hand, that cuts both ways. I recall a few years back commenting on a mailing list about someone planning a Torchwood campaign. Now, in Torchwood, especially the first season (which at the time was the only one released), there is quite a bit of swearing. Is that an inherent part of the genre? Arguably not, but equally it wouldn't occur to me that a campaign might have tighter restrictions than the source material on which it is based, so I said - to the shock of other posters - that, unless someone told me otherwise, I'd assume that strong language was permissible. The characters in the series do it, why would I assume a PC should be different?

In the case of our Hogwarts RPG, we went with a 12-certificate. We didn't have to follow the full guidelines for that, of course, but we mostly did. At 12-certificate, only the strongest words are outright forbidden, although the use of others should be limited. Deciding that Americans are more offended by the F-word than we are, we banned that one (specifically permitted at 12-certificate), along with discriminatory words (e.g. that one that begins with "N") and terms relating to the reproductive anatomy.

This, in fairness, allows considerably more leeway than actually appears in the books or films. It means that we allow some moderately strong British swearwords - possibly because many of the Americans don't know what they mean, and consequently aren't offended - that Harry & co. certainly don't use. In general, our players haven't take much advantage of this, and I think that's a good thing. Writing swearing so that it seems natural, rather than being inserted for the sake of it, isn't always that easy. Going back to Torchwood, strong language is still found in the later seasons, but after the first one, it wasn't so noticeable, largely because the writers seemed to be using it only when it made sense, rather than "ooh, I can have a character say 'f***'".

Which probably means our players are showing more restraint than some professional writers. Good on 'em.

Drugs & Alcohol
Speaking as a European, it has often seemed to me that Americans in general have a fairly odd attitude to alcohol. That may be unfair, but its notable that one of the rules we had on the site for some time was "no alcohol". This, despite the fact that alcoholic drinks are clearly mentioned in the books. On the castle board, where the characters are all underage, that's sensible enough, but it felt slightly odd to me on the board for Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade - which, notably, have pubs. I used to get round it by having characters at the pubs "have a drink" without specifying what it was they were drinking, but it still felt a bit strange.

Now that we've relaxed that - albeit with specific restrictions on underage drinking - I've noticed that it's actually the most popular of our new, expanded guidelines, to see use. To begin with, a lot of that revolved around players tormenting their own adult characters with vicious hangovers (some of which were, in fairness, pretty good to read in a black humour kind of way). More recently, it seems to have extended to scenes where characters drown their sorrows, or just the casual mention of the stuff that I missed not being able to write. So its being used to develop emotional plotlines, and just to have your character feel more realistic.

Fantasy RPGs usually have a quasi-medieval setting, and in the real world, medieval folks tended to drink a lot of wine or beer, not least because it was safer than the water. Taverns are a staple in such settings, being such good meeting places, and its hard to think of a teetotal fantasy RPG (I'm sure there must be one, though, especially if it's based on medieval Arabian culture).

Other drugs tend to be a different matter, especially where we're talking about anything that exists in the real world. Particularly in a text-based game, it's probably wise to avoid real details, or to portray harmful drugs in a positive light, if there's any risk of younger players reading. So far, that one's not cropped up for us, unless one counts mind-altering, but non-addictive, magical potions, but one can see it possibly being relevant in a modern game, or something like Call of Cthulhu.

Violence
Violence of some kind is pretty endemic in tabletop RPGs. You may be only inflicting it against foul monsters, or whatever, but, at some level it seems to be integral to almost all of them. (I actually can't think of a system that doesn't have at least some rules for combat, although there probably is one somewhere). But, when it comes to violence as an indicator of a more "adult" game, we aren't talking so much about "I hit him for 5 points of damage" as whether or not the descriptions are graphic.

I'd suggest that, in tabletop games, this probably makes little difference unless you're planning on being really gory in your descriptions - which would suggest a horror game, anyway. Text based games may rely more heavily on description, and the issue here would be how much the text dwells on blood or mutilation. For our 12-certificate game, that meant no dwelling on detail, and its a game setting where much of the violence will be in the form of zapping people with spells rather than hewing at them with axes, that's a pretty easy guideline to keep to. There is some mild gore in the books, but not much, and that seemed a fair limit for us, too.

In point of fact, there seems to have been no demand to use the relaxed rules on our site at all. Contrary to the likes of D&D, it seems our story lines do not generally focus on combat, outside of tightly regulated practice duelling.

Sex
So we come to the area that's probably most touchy. The British Board of Film Classification treats nudity and sex as separate topics, the former being of more significance in a primarily visual medium than it would be in tabletop or text-based RPGs. Merely saying that your character gets undressed, or has a shower, is somewhat different from showing full frontal nudity on the screen. If there is an equivalent to the latter in a text-based game, it would be going into a lengthy description of your character in the buff, which seems a slightly odd thing to do, especially in a supposedly non-sexual context.

But, if nudity doesn't matter in itself, sex is different. People do, rightly or wrongly, get concerned about that kind of thing. There's nothing further than snogging in the HP books, and, since most of the characters in our RPG are going to be underage anyway, that's a good place to draw the line. Adult characters in the game had previously become pregnant, although never with any indication of how they got that way! It could be argued that that was quite sufficient, and that this was an area where we could be stricter than the 12-certificate guidelines.

My own attitude is that, if we're going to allow nastier things to happen to the characters, we should also allow them to have a bit more fun, too. So, for adult characters outside the school, we instituted a rule that allows story lines that make reference to "off-screen" sex, without describing it. Barring mention of nudity in a sexual context also makes it clear where you should be "fading to black", even if, as noted above, nudity per se isn't much of an issue. This, I think, allows a wider range of story possibilities without showing anything that's not strictly necessary for the story to work - it's the consequences that are more likely to be key to a story, after all.

There are also gradations between that and "insert Tab A into Slot B", which might be appropriate in other games. I can certainly see how character development might be enhanced by exploring that side of a character's life and personality in more detail, for instance. And, if there's any area where ratings of proposed campaigns might be relevant, other than horror (which is usually implied by the setting, anyway), it's probably this one.

Thoughts on Ratings in RPGs - pt 1

As some of you will know, in addition to face-to-face RPing, I have, for many years now, also been helping to run a message board RPG based on the world of Harry Potter. It's effectively a parallel universe, and doesn't feature any of the characters from the books, but the background and locations are the same (or at least very similar), and the general theme - wizards in a boarding school - is, naturally, also the same. I mention this because I've been reflecting on the effects of a change we went through recently in the rules for RPing on the board.

A message board RPG is different from a face-to-face one in that it has a large number of players, most of whom will not know each other in real life, and may come to the game with different expectations. It's also a 'sandbox' setting, which means that a wide range of different themes could crop up in different story lines, and the admins (GMs) can't possibly keep a track of them all, let alone read and vet all of them. As a result, the site has rules for what sort of stories and descriptions are considered acceptable - a rating system of sorts.

I'm not really suggesting that such things are easily extendible, or even relevant, to most face-to-face games, or e-mail games, for that matter. Certainly, its unlikely they'd be required in face-to-face games among a small group of friends, unless, perhaps, there is some intention to have different ratings for different campaigns, and the players need to be clear on what those are in advance. But, nonetheless, the fact that we recently reviewed, and changed, our ratings strikes me as something of general interest in RPing.

Our previous rules on this particular subject were fairly simple. Essentially, we said that the site was intended to be PG certificate, and mostly left it at that. The choice of PG made some sense at the time, since the first two films had this certificate (in both the UK and US) and were pretty close to the books they were based on. It seems to me, if you want to simulate a particular literary source, you'll want to follow its conventions, and the rating is part of that. (There are, of course, sites on the internet that are ostensibly based on the HP books but allow all manner of hardcore material - that's a perfectly valid approach, but I think there is very much a place for following the theme of the books. After all, if somebody likes the books, the absence of such content might be part of their reason).

However, with time, it became clear that there were a couple of problems with this. The more obvious one, perhaps, is that the later films, once they came out, had a higher rating. In general, they had a PG-13 rating in America, and a 12-rating here in the UK - and, by implication, the same could be said of the later books. Since the message board we host on does not permit members under the age of 13 anyway, there was a good case for raising our rating to match that of the later films. I think, in practice, a number of players had done this anyway, without us jumping on them, and it made sense to formalise that.

So, when some players raised the issue with us, we polled the members of the board, and agreed to switch to a higher rating, one more in line with the later films and books - which are darker in tone than the first two. However, there is another problem with stating "this site is considered PG certificate" - what does that actually mean? The rating system of the Motion Picture Association of America is fairly vaguely defined (although the website linked to there is actually rather more informative than it was at the time) often boiling down to "if we don't think its appropriate, it isn't". And that was pretty much our rules at the time, as well. So, when we updated it, we instead used the system of the British Board of Film Classification, and went with a 12-certificate.

By adapting the rules of the BBFC to writing, rather than film, and spelling them out in detail, I think we made it much clearer what was and was not acceptable. This means that, hopefully, everyone knows where they stand, and I think that, in addition to allowing a greater freedom for players to explore their own story lines, it also makes it much clearer what we won't accept. Once again, I'm not suggesting that such detailed guidelines would be of much use in a face-to-face game, but I think there is some interest in looking at them.

One point to make here is that we run the game over a number of different boards, reflecting a wide range of different in-universe locations and activities. For example, there are separate boards for quidditch, magical duelling, and for magic lessons, in addition to the main one at the castle. Most of these have the same rules. However, the board that deals with the world outside the school is mainly populated by adult characters, and we felt that that made a significant difference to the sorts of stories that would be appropriate. Thus, it has the same general rating, but the actual rules are slightly more relaxed, reflecting the fact that a story in which an underage character does a particular thing may be very different from one in which an adult does the exact same activity. In practice, if one were going to extend these rules more generally, there could be a lot of changes like this, depending on the particular genre and expectations of the players.

Theme
The general theme of an RPG is the sort of thing that is normally included in a campaign description, whether any more specific ratings are needed or not. If you're playing Call of Cthulhu, its fairly obvious you're going to have a horror theme, and something that would be at least the equivalent of a 15-certificate were the game a film or video. Its also a reasonable expectation of a game like Vampire, although there is a fair degree of leeway there in just how dark the game could be (depending, for example, on how you portray the feeding).

Many other RPGs have an inherently dark theme, and this is the sort of thing that I feel it is generally useful to spell out when proposing a particular campaign, especially if it's radically different from what the group have been done in the past. In the case of our message board Hogwarts RPG, it seems to me that keeping a theme generally in keeping with the books is  good thing to do. I suspect that the inclusion of dementors, and later, of zombies, was the main reason for the 12 (or PG-13) rating the later films got, and this shows that mild horror is certainly acceptable within the genre.

There is, I think, something to be said for writing within a particular genre, and selecting limits for oneself based on that. That doesn't mean that taking a particular world and exploring some of its implications beyond what the source material covers doesn't also have its place. For instance, that the Potterverse has vampires and so on in it has some fairly dark implications that aren't explored in the books because of their target audience. I find it interesting to note though, that on our site, there seems very little demand for horror stories, although there have been some darker themes with respect to, for example, murder. Plus, we recently opened a Necromancy class, which is proving popular - and will, I suspect, lead to something a little darker than our usual fare.



In part 2, I will ponder on some more specific aspects of ratings an "adult" gaming.