I entered a competition on another site for submissions based around the notion of the Fallen Empire. This piece, about thirty "lost" books a party might rediscover, won the top prize; I remain rather pleased by it.
It's a bunch of archetypes: most the names, and in many cases the flavor text as well, come from real world examples of those archetypes. Feel free to gank at will, and use them to develop the archetypes for your own campaigns!
A Journal of the Plague Year: “Poor Tiranara was entirely in an uproar - another love sonnet talking about the “Dark Man” of my fantasies? I soothed her, in the end, but Trinity, am I tired of repeating that I say what I must to satisfy the public!”
The seminal diary of a great poet/author, about whom most of what is known comes from the text (and interpretations thereof) of her works. The diary conclusively proves that a lot of the critical presumption is wrong -- what people widely believe the author meant by this or that element is completely contrary to the author’s express intent.
Ab Urbe Condita Libri: “Being the Fourteenth Volume of the History and Lore of Mighty Selisengard, May The Queen of Cities Reign Forever!”
Some (or all) of the missing volumes from a celebrated monumental history (or encyclopedia) long believed to be incomplete.
Archimedes Palimpsest: “The motion of the Whole is the same as the Sum of the Motion of its Parts; namely, that In cases when the fall of a rider on a white horse occurs, it is beneficial if one reads aloud the Second Precept Against Harm or completes a number of virtuous acts.”
An important lost work, known to scholars. Some thrifty scribe took the last copy, scraped the parchment down, and inscribed an insipid, rambling religious text on the sheets ... but there are very faded marks of the original, and it might be able to be restored through sorcery of some sort.
Arzhang: “These are the signs of My Coming, and what which has been sent down to thee. From Me is the truth, but most men do not believe.”
The holy scripture of a major religion, long lost and passed down only in oral tradition. It may have sections contradicting in whole or in part current practice (which may have been corrupted in transmission), or detailing rites that have been forgotten, however consonant they may be with contemporary beliefs.
Book of the Watchers: “The man said to the woman, ‘You know what the priest is braying? He says in his sermon that a comet is coming and that will be the end of the world!’”
A religious tome telling a familiar tale, well known to adherents of the dominant faith -- so much so that the faithful all recognize the familiar phraseology, and many can recite sections from memory -- but with numerous differences, in cadence, plot and characterization.
Bunnye Raising Fr Ye Victualles & Profite: “Linseed oil (raw, not boiled), 1 anker; gum camphor, 4 drams; oil of cajeput, 1 dram; oil of anise, 1/4 dram. Mix with ye bunnye’s hay, 3 or 4 times daily.”
A hopelessly mundane book on a completely boring (or disgusting) subject ... only a section, two-thirds of the way through and seamlessly incorporated into the binding, details a dire prophecy or other warning, deliberately hidden there by the creator of the book.
Canon of Proportions: “If you place a spherical body between various objects - that is to say with sunlight on one side of it, and on the other a wall illuminated by the sun, which wall may be green or of any other color, while the surface on which it is placed may be red, and the two lateral sides are in shadow - you will see that the natural color of that body will assume something of the hue reflected from those objects.”
A massive series of notebooks, unmistakably in the hand of a renowned artist or scientist (despite being written in an odd mirror-image script), demonstrating that -- unknown to contemporary scholarship -- she was a genuine polymath, in complete command of many sciences and fields of study. Included are many examples demonstrating that she invented certain things centuries before they became known to the culture - as well as some inventions not yet known to science. Plainly they were compiled as a galley proof before publication, but there is nothing to indicate why they never were published.
Canticles of the Rose City: “Gandeleyn lokyd hym est and west, Be euery syde: ‘Hoo hat myn mayster slayin? Ho hat don this dede? Xal I neuer out of grene wode go Til I se sydis blede.’”
An epic song cycle -- or great work of fiction -- beloved in the present day ... and proving that it was written many centuries before its attribution to the person everyone had believed all this time was the author.
Casca the Mercenary: “XVII Kalends Sextilis: ... so when the whipping was done and that poor hook-nosed chap with the cross was dragged down the street, I sent Julia out to mop the blood off the cobbles - I’ve had poor business enough this week without that! Marcian says the criminals will be nailed up just after noon, poor bastards. I think I’ll go watch. Aemilia came by at last - she’s newly betrothed to a fine young fellow ...”
A diary of someone ordinary, but who was witness to some significant historical event and has some startling eyewitness details (or, alternately, who just lived in a particularly extraordinary era). There may be several such diaries, all from correspondents living in the same period, referencing some of the same events.
Dictionary of Forgotten Things: “There are fifty-four cities in the island, all large and well built, the manners, customs, and laws of which are the same, and they are all contrived as near in the same manner as the ground on which they stand will allow. The nearest lie at least twenty-four miles’ distance from one another ...”
An atlas describing an unknown land in exhaustive detail, an encyclopedia with entries of people, events and/or creatures with which scholarship is unfamiliar. The punchline is that these are fictional, intended to be fantastic inventions. (I’ve noted that many players of fantasy RPGs have a hard time conceptualizing the notion of not-real myth and fantasy within their own gameworlds’ cultures.)
Dr. Chase’s Receipt Book: “Moisten a sponge with oil extract of paraffin, roll it in fine powder of borax, and push it onto the wound for several hours daily. Make sure that the band holding it to the limb is of undyed, unbleached muslin or linen. For an obstinate case, use an insufflation of powdered vegetable charcoal.”
A large book stuffed with old, forgotten techniques for a field (or several fields) of science, industry or magic which went out of vogue for economic, cultural or technical reasons. The reasons no longer apply, due either to changing viewpoints, scientific advances or other factors: for example, a useful herbal preparation that ceased to be employed because of wide access to a substitute herb, one no longer in cultivation.
Gingerbread: “4 Kelusse: Dawn - No change. 8 AM - Golden light in the southern sky, tinged with green. 10 AM - Light much reduced. Noon - Golden light completely vanished. 2 PM - No change ...”
A book of detailed research, compiling events and patterns pertaining to then-current events. It was plainly a work-in-progress compilation, without evident conclusion ... then. Subsequent well-known events and/or history complete the pattern, and it would make much more sense to a researcher now.
Gnostic Bible: “I said to the savior, ‘High One, will all the souls be led safely into pure light?’ She answered and said to me, ‘These are great matters that have arisen in your mind, and it is difficult to explain them to anyone except those who are enlightened.’”
An entire book -- or collection of chapters, tales and/or essays -- devoted to one of the world’s leading faiths ... and which completely contradict several major doctrines of that faith, or introduce doctrines hitherto unknown to it. The work may have been excised from the canon centuries ago as apocryphal.
History of Cardenio: “Fabian. Your master is wondrously distracted. / Giraldo. I believe so, sir, but I have ceased to wonder at his wondering wanderings. / Fabian. Why? / Giraldo. It seems to be his habitual manner after escaping away from any damsel's chamber.”
The text of a long-lost play (or novel) popularly attributed by literary scholars to the greatest author in the culture’s canon ... unfortunately, there are enough stylistic differences in the actual text to place the authorship in doubt. Or is it, indeed, the true author’s voice, and if so, where does that leave his known corpora of tales?
Libri Sibyllini: “To cast the Blaze of Glory, it is well to have long fingers, up to one shaftment at the maximum length. This is necessary in order to attain the perfect flow for the second and seventh passes of the left hand ...”
An ancient book of magic describing new spells or new techniques for casting them. However, the book was written before the long centuries perfected contemporary sorcery, and the book makes some dangerously flawed presumptions, subsequently discarded, as well as using long-forgotten units of measurement. Alternately, there are spells within far more powerful than their present-day analogues ... and far more dangerous and uncontrollable as well.
Meretricum Vita: “Some who were formerly convicted of heresy, and whom I confuted at the Council of Warwik, have dared to write to your Reverence that my opinions are neither orthodox nor in agreement with the Consistory. ‘The wife surprised me, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl with my hands in her coats, and indeed I was with my mortar in her pestle. I was at a wonderful loss upon it and the girl also.’ What about this monstrosity merits anything beyond our calumny?”
A legendary R-rated work -- whether fiction or non-fiction -- that was suppressed by the Powers-That-Be and has previously survived only in fragments, angrily quoted in more “decent” works as examples of the original’s immorality.
Mother Shipton Predictions: “The world to an end shall come, in eighteen hundred and eighty one.”
A book of collected prophecies from a “soothsayer” celebrated in ancient times, but long since discredited as a charlatan or madman. The degree to which all the prophecies are useless is, of course, up to the GM ...
Pneumatica: “Let us now proceed to construct the necessary instruments, beginning with the less important, as from the elements. The following is a contrivance of use in pouring out wine. A hollow globe of bronze is provided, such as A B (fig. 6) pierced in the lower part with numerous small holes like a sieve ...”
Descriptions of scientific apparatuses which can be readily made by contemporary technology -- including steam engines, vending machines, wind-powered machinery, reciprocal pumps and the like -- but are unknown to, or forgotten by, current culture.
The Secret History: “When she had bared her nakedness, she would sink down to the stage floor and recline on her back. Slaves to whom the duty was entrusted would then scatter grains of barley from above onto the calyx of this passion flower, whence geese, trained for the purpose, would next pick the grains one by one with their bills and eat.”
A history of well-known events by a noted historian of the period ... only describing all the salacious, ribald and even obscene details he left out of his “official” history. A litany of infidelities, crimes, backstabbings and betrayals, often from individuals held out to be blameless (or even prominent culture heroes) in standard historical canon.
Tironian Notes: “Sdn at fst rfsd Agn he tld hr of th hm in whch y wld lv, th rch frs + ivry ncklcs th he wld gv hr ...”
It’s not so much that the book is in an ancient language; it’s that it’s written in what was apparently a standard shorthand of the day, which removes many vowels and makes heavy use of abbreviation and then-current idiom, rendering translation extremely difficult.
Tombs of the Kings: “Seventh Fane, Eleventh Sepulchre - here was interred Lady Arathena Elyanwe, illegitimate daughter of Prince Alveron II, buried in a kimono of sapphire blue embroidered in gold and green, also with a sapphire set in a platinum ring, and holding a kidskin bound Canon of Changes, while ...”
An immense, dry work, listing in exhaustive detail every tomb of every noble in the land, the biographies of said nobles, every item placed in every tomb, down to the middle names of the daughters-in-law of the masons who mortared up the tomb entrances ... that sort of thing. The vast majority of these tombs are well-known and looted ages ago ... but one obscure section references some no one has heard of before. Right under the current sprawling royal palace, somewhere. And there are two pages torn out of the book.
Wyzards, Ye Care & Feeding Of: “I demanded he give me cheese. He glared at me, then turned back to scratching that paper with the feather. Useless master, I served him out by performing my relievements in his bin of enchanted spices -- Worthless spirit, keep on writing my words or I shall bite you.”
A somewhat jocular diary/owners’ manual of wizards, written from the point of view of a familiar. The kicker is that although the book is many centuries/millennia old, the authoring familiar is known to the party -- either the familiar of a wizard they know, or the familiar of the party wizard -- and the book is either unmistakably in the familiar’s speech patterns, or else describes the familiar accurately enough to make an identification.
Contes de la Mere Oye: “My father, he died - but I can’t tell you how / But he left me six horses to drive on my plough / With a wimmy lo, wommy lo! / Wimmy lo! Wommy lo! / Jack sing saddle oh!”
The original manuscript for a commonly known children's book of rhymes and/or folktales -- apparently in the author’s own hand -- but upon close examination, has some significant differences from the modern-day text. The book is also heavily annotated in the margins, in the same hand, which indicates that the author’s intent is something else entirely: a prophecy, a satire of contemporary political events or persons, secret arcane knowledge, and the like.
Freedom and Necessity: “You must choose how you, and even I, proceed now ... for I cannot. I have trusted in that natural reserve and discretion that I know to be so strong in you, dearest Cousin, to keep the source and contents of this letter from the knowledge of any other, unless the time and company be such to recommend their revelation.”
An epistolary work, purporting to be the correspondence of two famous -- or infamous -- individuals, not otherwise known to have had a romantic relationship, but clearly indicated to have had a torrid one indeed.
The Music Lesson: “I met up with the Khibil around dusk, and we went over the plan again. That took a half hour, no more. Then we sat in the bar, saying nothing. There were dancers, but the Khibil just sneered. I guess he wasn’t much for that kind of stuff.”
A diary detailing the theft of several works of art, magical artifacts or crown jewels, well known to the modern-day world. The problem is threefold: first, they are not known to be stolen; second, a plainly ancient book has details and elements that fit only in modern-day times; third, the author (or another principal character) is known to the party -- the description is unmistakable -- but with a completely different personality than that depicted in the book.
Physiologus: “The shark is an amphibious animal: that is to say, it does not take in water, but breathes and sleeps and brings forth on dry land - only close to the shore - as being an animal furnished with feet; it spends, however, the greater part of its time in the sea and derives its food from it, so that it must be classed in the category of marine animals.”
A bestiary which describes known monsters and/or animals, with a lot of the details not only being wrong (or just differing from conventional wisdom) but glaringly so. Many other setting details are surprisingly off-kilter as well ... to phrase things in 21st century terms, “Iowa” is situated by the sea, the “Grand Canyon” is north of Canada, and the “raspberries” given as the favorite food of sparrows are bright green and the size of softballs.
Trebatius Testa: “If any evil into which one has made, it is the right song and judgment. Let it be, if any man be evil, but if any man be good? I deny any praise to the Emperor, for he knows the difference no more than does a swine!”
A play, story, ballad or other work of fiction, known to modern-day connoisseurs, which appears to be in this case the prototype of the work. In the original, it heavily defames the rulers, Beautiful People and/or aristocracy of the period ... and is bowdlerized just as heavily to strip the salient details out in the final version.
Unaussprechlichen Kulten: “I hath dreamed the dreams of the Serpent-Folk, and communed with long-dead reptiles, and eagerly watched through the Ages the unending sorrows and suffering of mortalkind. I await the day when the hand of doom shall rise, and cast aside the remnants of a jaded, decayed mortalkind: and Those who Crawl and Slither shall again inherit the World.”
A detailed dissertation -- in monograph form, handwritten, even in an era of printing -- of one or more awful Pariah Cults, examining their practices and doctrine in nauseating detail. Historically correct references to contemporary places and events are given, as well as allusions to how contemporary known figures are Secret Initiates. The only hitch: the historical record makes no reference to the cult/s at all. Anywhere. Completely unknown.
On one of those sites where people chip in on a list, there was a thread concerning elements you might find in a small town, suitable for a mystery or horror campaign.
I don’t GM horror. I think it’s a uniquely difficult milieu for gaming, and I believe it takes a rare player to manage. But I seem to have a knack for producing these little bits, and I know small town New England intimately. Herewith my own entries, for your edification.
1) There's a stereotypical country store (fitting into the milieu), with four elderly men sitting on the porch, smoking pipes. But they don't talk. They never talk, except when directly addressed, and then only curtly and briefly. They are always there, from just after sunup to just before sundown, they always sit on the porch in the exact same order, and they just stare at the street traffic ... including one who’s plainly blind, with a cane, but staring anyway. Puffing silently.
2) There are no pets. Anywhere. No dogs, no cats, no parakeets. There is evidence of pets - the occasional dog house, the bird cage in Mrs. McGarry's window, the bin of rabbit food in the feed store - but no critters. Except by nightfall, one can hear the occasional cat yowl or dog bark ... but never see any. If the PCs bring a pet with them, it will go bonkers the moment it breaks the town line, berserk and doing its level and continual best to Get Away.
3) The perky young sales clerk behind the counter of the five and dime is a different one every day. She's friendly, wholesome-pretty, hourglass-figure, is always a cheerleader at the local high school, always an orphan (living with an uncle and aunt), always a parishioner at the Congregational church over on the corner of West and Bridge Street ... and looks blank and confused if asked who was clerking there the day before.
4) Speaking of Bridge Street ... the bridge crosses the Mill River, where the old abandoned furniture mill is, right up against the mountain. No one ever goes there. No one lives on the other side of the river, either. And no one in town will talk about it except to reaffirm that everyone stays away, because, well, they "just do." The local police will drive across the bridge once per shift, do a donut, and come right back across, losing no time to do so.
5) There's a modest town green, with a band gazebo, an old war monument, a public drinking fountain built a century ago ... and a weathered sandstone menhir entirely jarring and out of place amidst the 19th century granite and decor. On the menhir is a bright yellow ceramic 1950s style bowl. Broken. It's always there, no one will talk about it, and the villagers will gasp in horrified consternation if anyone touches it. Even so, they'll plaster strained smiles on their faces, won't talk about it, and try desperately to change the subject.
6) Every 66th day, the high school sports teams change IDs. In December it was the Red Raiders; now it's the Lakers. Completely new name, completely new uniforms, completely new mascots, for all the school's teams. Booster club jackets will suddenly change to conform. It will be as if there never was a difference. The town's weekly newspaper will have sections clipped out of the back issues at the library which would indicate the old names ... or they'll be replaced.
7) Something you tell one person seems to spread to the rest of the town instantly. Mention on your first trip into the town to the waitress at the diner as you're paying your tab that you're a writer for the Patriot Ledger, when you cross the street to get a pack of smokes at the corner store, the proprietor affably says, "My, bein' a reporter must be an excitin' job, eh, sir? I keep reading of all them criminals in your paper!"
8) At six minutes past 7:00 pm every day, all the residents above the age of ten, all at once, break into a couple of verses of a song popular on the charts ten years before. It is a different song every day (and a very discerning and musically apt PC will realize that the first initial of the song title the first day is "H," the second "G", the third "F", slated to count backwards to "A" during their stay), and no one sings for longer than about fifty seconds. If asked why they do it, the PCs will get answers ranging from "We just like it" to "This is just something we all do."
(Yes, this is indeed the 66th minute after 6 PM.)
9) All the televisions in town, be they old-fashioned analog sets with dials or digital jobs with remotes, lack Channel 2; they all start at "3." The only exceptions are three sets, all with navy blue cases; one in Town Hall, one in the Congregational Church basement used for social hour, one in the local barber's shop. In every case, the PCs will be told the sets are broken, and they will be prevented from examining them, physically if necessary, violently if it comes to it.
10) No family name in the town's two graveyards seems to have any living relatives in the town now; even townsfolk who claim their families have lived there for generations have no one buried there. If asked, they will say "Oh, Grandpa Leach was buried up around Ballardsville" or some such other location, but even if a PC goes to the Ballardsville cemetery to investigate, no such grave is found ...
11) There's some relatively common plant (dandelions, say) which grows right up to, but not into the town; the break is sharp enough to accurately demarcate the town line. Locals will shrug and respond "Tain't never tried, mister," or "Plant some your own self, if you've a mind," or some such; in any event, they're blandly incurious.
12) Digging into the soil with a shovel, below about seven inches (trowel depth), will produce a slightly ringing tone, as if you're digging into metal-laden soil. Nonetheless, the dirt doesn't look or feel any different. Digging into the dirt across the town line -- even inches apart -- has no such sound.
13) Tree sap for all trees in the town, no matter the kind, is unusually runny and ruddier in hue than normal. Any local products made from tree sap (maple sugar and syrup, for instance) will have a similar tinge.
14) There's a popular vanished brand in town, one no longer extant in the real world. The men use Hai Karate aftershave, ailing children are dosed with Peruna, the local auto dealership proudly peddles 2014 model Packards and Nashes, the grocery store has Lucky Strike Green on sale and the breakfast cereal aisle sports boxes of Quisp and Quake. The brand is plainly up to date, the product is new and sound, and the labeling carries all appropriate current dates, up to and including bar codes even for products that vanished decades before such things were mandatory. The locals react to questions about the same way you would if a stranger dashed up to you and blurted out "Omahgosh you're drinking Pepsi, where did you get that??" If pressed, a salesman will say "Well, mister, they come on the delivery truck every week with all the other new stuff."
15) The local weekly newspaper is a county-wide paper, supposedly printed at the county seat ... but it doesn't actually exist outside of town, and the address on the colophon is on a street that was redeveloped into a ten-acre wide shopping mall (the clerk at the county Registry of Deeds snorts and says "Heh, Oliver Street's about where ladies' lingerie is at Steiger's now, pal") decades ago. Nevertheless, the local library has musty old issues dating back forty years or more ... and, doubly creepily, the paper's "Town Talk" section has ongoing columns and articles for at least three other towns that don't exist, but for which locals can be found to claim to have relatives living "up that way."
16) There aren't any local maps. Anywhere. Markets don't sell any, the police and firemen shrug and claim they don't need them, the clerk at the assessor's office sighs heavily and admits she spilled a coffee cup on hers last week, and they're still waiting for a new one from the printer's. Word is that you can scavenge one from the library, but it was printed in 1851 ...
17) When you walk into the five-and-dime, the store's playing musak - but the instant you walk in, the musak flips to stereotypical horror movie incidental music: cellos playing a loud DUM DUM DAAAAHHHH, oboes in minor keys, a quick violin pizzicato. After a short tympani roll, the horror theme music stops, and bland cheerful pop musak more typical of such places resume. The aforementioned perky young clerk, if asked about it, says "Yes ma'am, I sure heard that. Last time they played music like that was, gosh, the day there was the accident at the sawmill."
18) The town's cemeteries prominently display war dead, whether through notable monuments, sections where Revolutionary War (WWI, Great Patriotic War, the Boer War, etc.) dead are clustered, wars noted on headstones. Plainly the town is heavy on military service -- the aforementioned monuments list a few dozen names apiece -- but one notable war is conspicuously and inexplicably absent. An American village will have a Civil War monument and a Vietnam War monument, but no WWII monument and no sign of WWII casualties or involvement, for example.
19) There are three times as many of a particular business as a town that size, in its location, could possibly support. A small town far away from highways with four (seemingly thriving) gas stations, for instance.
20) There’s a key element of national history that the locals seem to get badly wrong. For example:
Oldtimer: Why, it's true, ma'am. Clark County only rejoined the Union in 1955. Big flap about it up around the county seat back in the day when them reporter fellas found out it'd been exempted from Reconstruction, yes'm ...
Bewildered PC: (interrupting) ... err, but, sir, this is Iowa -- the state never seceded in the first place!
Oldtimer: (furrowing his whitened brow) Ma'am, I don't know rightly what to tell you. We never had much t'do with the lawyer fellas up to Des Moines. (takes a puff from his pipe) Anyway when the reporter fellas up at the county seat found out the county'd seceded in 1866, why they ...
21) The shabby Congregational church the PCs investigate (or the town clerk's office, or the Chamber of Commerce, etc ...) has two completely contradictory pieces of computer equipment up and running: a top-of-the-line Gateway FX quad core overclocked gaming PC and a WiFi hookup with a 30 year old Panasonic KP dot matrix printer. The clerk sees nothing amiss in this, claiming that she doesn't know much about these computer things, or where the wireless router might be ...
22) March only has 30 days. Every calendar in town says so, every reference book backs that up, and somehow all TV, radio, cell and transmission reception starts going on the fritz on the afternoon of the 30th ...
23) No one in town wears blue. No article of clothing has a scrap of the color in it, or wears any logo that would. That aside, blue is used in common decor, draperies, paint, wallpaper and everywhere else about as often as it would be in anywhere else. Inexplicably, “blue jeans” are still called that, even if they’re scarlet or mauve.
24) Any items made of silver or silver-plated that the characters bring with them start to tarnish, and tarnish unnaturally fast. Items that leave the PCs' possession cease to do so.
25) One of the town's two cemeteries is decommissioned now; graves started petering out in it after WWI, and dates on headstones thereafter became quickly and increasingly sparse. The second to the last date is 1955 ... but there is one single headstone, not in any unusual spot or sequestered at all from the other graves. According to the headstone, the person there died the day before his or her 100th birthday ... and though the date of death is 1986, no grass grows on the gravemound.
26) Cars are visibly around, about as many as the locale would normally support. Locals can be seen cheerfully washing and waxing them, they are in carports, driveways and on sidewalks as appropriate, and Slim down at Slim's Garage gives you a friendly wave before going back into the SUV's engine to finish the tuneup. Cars all see reasonable signs of use: baby seats set up, a styrofoam coffee cup in the holder, books and papers in the backseat, mud or frost in appropriate seasons. Yet no one is ever seen by the PCs to drive one, and none are ever visibly on the roads, although the town's one traffic light changes at appropriate intervals. The PCs can also hear appropriate car sounds ... horns outside their hotel window, the sound of an engine revving around the corner ... but they will never see one in motion, and should they dash to investigate, the most they'll ever see is someone getting out of a newly parked vehicle or a cloud of exhaust fumes just around that corner there ...
Should the PCs stake out a spot where they know a car should arrive soon -- that friendly couple Dave and Karen, say, with Dave due home from work in a few minutes -- either Karen will get a phone call from Dave apologizing, but his sister's not feeling well and he's going to run over her groceries, or Dave's silhouette will suddenly appear through the window, and he'll reply blandly that sure, he just got home from work, why there's his car in the garage right there.
The locals will universally assert that they do, indeed, drive, that deliveries are made, that the bus comes through twice a day to the city ... although they never will say "Look, there goes one now." They will react much the same way as you would if some nutcase came up to you and insisted that no cars ever drive by in your own hometown. If you insist they do so, right now, just to prove it to you, this is the point where they will Cease To Be Amused By The Outsiders' Tomfoolery, direct you to stop wasting their time, and take yourself elsewhere.
27) After school, every afternoon at the same hour, a bunch of kids are in the junior high’s schoolyard, playing duelist with boffer weapons. One kid is plainly superior to the others, winning every fight, even against odds. The next day, that kid is still out there; all the other kids are different. The next day the same, and the next one after that. If that kid is ever to lose (either through PC interference or some other machination) the new winner is there the next day, all the kids are different, and the cycle begins anew. On that first day, the old champion stands at the edge of the schoolyard, looking on with bleak, redrimmed eyes. If approached, he’ll run like the clappers. In any event, the PCs will never see him again.
Eh, a couple short rants, while I'm at it ...
Logic doesn't necessarily equal tactics; we don't all play our PCs as if they were game board pieces.
I think back to all the years I played in a boffer fantasy LARP. My character was a national leader and the game's most powerful ritual magician, and furthermore was played by a fellow who was 42 years old in my final season, with badly deteriorating knees and wrists, and the second oldest player in the whole game.
It was strategically stupid for me to be on the front lines. I could've directed traffic far better from a safe rear position, and reserved my powerful strategic spells for cool, considered uses. I am not ten feet tall, and couldn't see over battlelines to know where each and every good guy was, at each and every moment, and how best to aid him. The fog of war worked on me as much as on anyone.
But there were considerations. It was important for people to see me out there, taking the same risks as they were, doing the same things they did. Folks are less likely to complain about hardships if they see someone much older than they are doing the same things.
And I really didn't want to be a REMF. I wanted to buckle some swashes and get out there and fight, and even if my wrists couldn't handle heavy fighting any more, I could still use a bow.
So why should I play any differently in tabletop? My characters have motivations that might not be cool and considered, and drive my actions in directions a chess master might not select.
I've spent a bit too much time in estate law, and a concept that's always tickled me is how sentient undead in a culture (beyond "Ahhh, it's a filthy necromancer, kill the blasphemer on sight!") would affect that.
At what point does a decedent's will kick in? When he dies? What if his corpse is walking, talking and plainly competent to make decisions? Does being a controlled thrall under the sway of a more powerful undead factor in, and if so, at what point can the court appoint a receiver or a guardian? (Is being a thrall a legally enforceable contract?) And if you rule that you lose control of your property the moment you die, how does that play in to resurrection/revivication magics or processes? Sorry, our kingdom is a constitutional monarchy with a disestablished church, and our probate laws can't take into account your theological differences between raising someone from the dead and raising someone from the dead as a vampire, Your Eminence.
Man, it isn't that the heirs of a dead millionaire would burn his body. It's that they'd burn his body before the flesh was cold, make the ashes into bricks, then blow up the bricks.
Back in the day (college, and for a few years after) I ran an insane schedule. There was a time I had four campaigns going at once – three fantasy campaigns with GURPS, one Champions campaign – and I was prone to frequent burnout. I had to take a few months off every two to three years.
Then I discovered fantasy combat LARPing. I'd been a GM for twenty years. I'd done that about ten times as often as I was ever a player. Not only did I want to play, but there was the sheer exhilaration of not merely sitting back in an armchair, holding dice and telling a GM what my character was doing, but by-God working my way through a forest, holding a cutlass and leading an actual attack against the bad guys. For real. Being physical again, as I hadn't been since I was a teenager.
It was full of awesome ... and it also took place on the weekends. The summer I went full-on, starting a long stretch of 15-20 events a year, my carefully balanced two-weekends-a-month groups went blooey. I called another "hiatus" -- this one lasted nearly a decade.
But ... combat LARPing is a young adventurer's game. I'd been LARPing 13 years all told by the early 2000s, and I was a few years older than most of the others when I'd started. The politicking had long since gotten to me, it was eating my life, and at age 42 (the oldest player in the game), the six hours of fight practice I was inflicting upon my deteriorating joints each week wasn't doing more than slowing the erosion of my skills. I got out.
So I wasn't being creative, I was bored out of my gourd, our social circle had almost all been in the LARP (and promptly vanished when we did), and my future wife suggested I haul the dusty crates full of papers and gamebooks out of the basement and GM again. That was eleven years ago.
And that's the way to do it. Burned out? Your game just isn't satisfying, and hasn't been for a while? Take six months off and walk in the woods. Take in some hockey or soccer matches. Play board games. Do that volunteer work your gaming schedule sabotaged. Catch up on your reading, go bowling, hit a museum a day a week, whatever. The official rules of that LARP were ceremonially read before every event, and Rule #1 started with "We should all be doing this to have fun."
I keep that in mind. We should all be doing this to have fun. If we're not, we should do something that is, and if that isn't playing RPGs, then it isn't. No harm, no foul. Honest.
Seriously, your friends will understand. Heck, two of the players at the end in 1994 came back, and are in my group today.
(written for a competition on another site)
We gawked at the villagers, all in their best clothes, marching towards the field to the slow cadences of drum and pipes. Dray rubbed the side of his head, looking as if he’d swallowed a bead of Dreamdrowse. “Gwythar,” he muttered, “Am I still drunk, or did that old geezer really say they were all marching to ‘Judgment Day?’”
Me, I wheeled my mount around. I’d heard it too, and if “Judgment Day” was in that bloody field, I was going to be galloping in the other direction fast as I could!
1) Strewing Day
Every year, on the festival of Barley Harvest (in the late spring), the village of Athelren holds a “hay-strewing” to fulfill the terms of a strange bequest. Legend has it that a local woman left the field upon which the village’s temple to Ratri -- Goddess of the Shadows -- was built, so long as the villagers provided enough hay to cover the sanctuary floor on Barley Harvest, and did so within the span of an hour. The reason for this odd condition is unknown, except for the jocular rumor that the woman was troubled by the squeaking of the congregants’ Darkday-best boots -- worn on the holiday -- on the basalt stones of the sanctuary! An antique hourglass, fashioned of black walnut, is used to time the ceremony, and has a place of pride year-round in a niche behind the altar.
2) Judgment Day
Taking place a week before every solstice and equinox, the manors around the north Aldrya Valley hold local court. Traditionally rotating around four of the central manors (Diamondblade in the spring, Redwave in the summer, Willowlight in harvest time and Moonfire in midwinter), this is far more ceremonial than a true criminal court, although locals lose little chance to daunt outsiders and travelers. The people of each manor march to the host manor, led by two sergeants-at-arms bearing polished weapons and by two players with pipes and drum; behind them are two long garlands carried by the village youth -- flowers in season and greenery otherwise. The stewards of the manors act as a collective court, ruling on disputes between residents of differing manors, as well as handling minor matters of hooliganism and vandalism. After the court, a festive fair is held.
3) Chase Day
An old tradition in the village of Ambleside holds that the rich fields around the community used to consist of wastelands, scorched and ruled by a terrible dragon. The mighty hero Princess Verella Waflo Elyanwe, bearing the great battlesword Meldil, is said to have driven the dragon away in a ferocious combat lasting hours, redeeming the land for the ancestors of the villagers. In the second week of winter, the local church’s bell is rung continually for the three hours the battle was said to take -- to “keep the dragon away” -- and mock combats and tourneys of skill are held amidst the clamor. One custom for Chase Day is for village maidens to dye their hair to ape the blonde Princess’ flowing tresses. The festival is commemorated further in slang; someone who makes a great deal of noise in Ambleside is said to be “keeping the dragon away,” and any young woman who practices arms with the village militia is called a “Lightdancer” after the pseudonym Princess Verella is said to have used in her errantry career.
4) The Feast of Wine
Many villages in the uplands of the Mithlantra wine growing districts practice similar customs during the Feast of Wine, which happens in the fall when last year’s vintages are first broached. Traditional line dances are performed, generally by competing teams wearing colorfully embroidered uniforms (aping the realm’s military dress of four centuries agone) that are passed down from parent to child. Each team leader -- the team’s “Captain” -- wears a close-fitting cap, each fashioned from the fur of a different animal, after which his or her team is named. Part of the festival involves the Captains having a dance contest of their own, using long poles with which they mimic the fighting style of a duelist in stylized, improvised battles. The losing Captains must pay a forfeit of half a gallon of wine to the winner, and the losing team members traditionally each give a silver penny to be shared by the orphans of any dancers deceased in the last year.
5) Blessing of the River
Every spring, on the first Waterday after the ice breaks up on the Aldrya, the manors of the northern Aldrya Valley have this traditional ceremony. Legend has it that a man fell into one of the creeks of the watershed and was set upon by leeches. Fearing death, he prayed aloud to Wavedancer, spirit of the waters, who swept the bloodsuckers away with a wave of her hand. As an offering, he is said to have broken a rich cake in his hands and scattered the crumbs on the water. Each cottage provides a small cake or loaf of bread for Wavedancer on this day, which the head of the household breaks into one of the local streams; tradition holds that the stream into which a household offers a loaf will draw fish ninefold from it during the year.
6) Packet Race
Some of the finest tea in the world grows in the mountain country of Arsiriand. The “first flush” -- the first picking in the growing season of the topmost inch or two of the tea leaves, both the sparsest take and the most highly prized of the season -- is picked in mid-spring, and the day this is packed sees this traditional race to the lowland trading stations. Samples of the new tea is packed into quart-sized stoneware bottles, each handed to a fleet footed youth; depending on how high the village is up the mountainside, the race can be anywhere from three to ten miles long. The first one to make it to the trading station with the bottle intact wins a coin of gold (generously provided by the tea trading compagnia) and is looked upon with great favor in his or her home village, especially as a marriage prospect. It is considered very bad luck to interfere with a runner (or for them to interfere with one another). One bottle is always set aside, and kept displayed in the village’s tavern with those of previous years as part of the historical record of tea cultivation.
7) Binding Festival
This curious custom, now dying out except in a handful of villages in the Linaldan backcountry, is observed in the late spring. Its ostensible reason, as far as historians believe, was to raise alms for charitable purposes. The women of the village, on Lightday, will seize an unsuspecting (unmarried) man, blind him with a thick woolen cloth, and demand a forfeit of a coin to set him free; it is considered very poor sport to attempt to break free when surrounded. The men, on the following day, practice the same bindings on unmarried women. Those who lack coins -- or who do not wish to pay -- can pay a forfeit of a kiss to one of his or her captors, chosen blind and at random. It is considered very unsporting for the kiss to last less than the time it takes to recite a brief prayer (30 seconds, about)! The fun lasts until the village reeve blows an ancient horn, reserved for the purpose in the village tavern, at which time the village gathers for a feast and the collected coins are distributed to those who most have need of them.
8) Toasting the Trees
According to tradition in rural sections of the Aldrya Valley, the third Darkday of the new year is the coldest day on the calendar. In order to preserve the fruit trees that are the agricultural mainstays of the district, toasts are drunk to their health on this day. Villagers carrying lanterns and a jug of hard cider (generally provided by the orchard owners or local taverns) make the round of the manors’ orchards after dark. The children -- who always find it a great treat to be allowed to stay up after dark -- run around screeching out traditional warding cries to fend off evil spirits. At a designated tree in each orchard, a villager drinks a toast to the tree (often there is a traditional cup, saved for the purpose), wishing it good health and fresh life in the spring. “Horn fill, horn pull / Give us two score bushels full!” is an example of the toast used, which varies from village to village. Some villages are said to practice fertility rites after the toast, involving two young volunteers by the bole of the tree after the children have moved on to the next orchard.
9) Kandrice’s Day
“Two in front and two behind,
Wavering in storm and sea,
Lovers wish yourselves to be,
Sealed with tokens sure to find.”
This cryptic charge from the famed seer Sana Kandrice Ravenswing has been long remembered in her home village of Alfirin on the Warwik seacoast, provoking a custom even in her lifetime held around her birthday in late winter, which has spread up and down the coast within the province of Vindelka. The young unmarried men of the village will spend weeks carving or scrimshawing elegant tokens out of shark’s teeth or bone, and the day before the festival cook them into fruit tarts or pastries. These are all put on display at the church (or the common room of the village tavern) in groups of two rows of two. The local maidens are encouraged to use traditional divination methods to discern which tart holds the token of the young man she most favors; these include the throwing of bones or polished rods, the dropping of candle wax drippings into cold water, casting aromatic herbs into flames and watching the smoke, and myriad other methods. On the day itself, the young ladies each pick a tart, and it is said that the fates look kindly upon her marrying the young man whose token is within the tart she picks ... although a great deal of trading surreptitiously often takes place. In any event, each group of eight -- the four young men baking the pastries in each double row, and the four ladies picking them -- are considered bound by the choices, almost as if they are kin, and can ask one another for aid or favors in the next year.
10) The Fire Dance
Held on the day before midsummer on the north Warwik coast, this fair is a joyous festival, marked with feasting, agricultural trading and gift-giving. The cap of the festival is a traditional dance by the village’s seven best dancers. Each one, a half hour after full dark, appear in a customary costume wrought of gull feathers, dyed in riotous hues and with a feather cape. The dancers bear torches to the coastline (preferably on a cliff or other promontory, if available) and perform a stylized dance, all in a line, weaving between one another interchangeably while waving the torches around. It is a dangerous dance, and part of the prowess of the performers is displayed by seeing how close they can come with their torches to one another without actually setting one another on fire. The origin of the Fire Dance is believed to stem from the old suppressed custom of “wrecking,” where coast dwellers lured merchantmen into the rocks with false signals so that they might turn scavenger on the shipwrecked cargoes, but folklorists do well not to mention this to the villagers, who take strong offense at the suggestion.
11) Graveyard Day
North Point is a veritable wasteland, thrust out into the sea and scoured by winds; it is a bleak and unlovely place, with only firs and spruces for foliage. The only protected dell in the village is the local graveyard by the Manannan temple. Every spring, on a day colloquially known as “Graveyard Day,” villagers come to plant flowers around the graves, and it has become something of a local competition amongst the schoolchildren, who “adopt” graves and turn them into veritable gardens. A great deal of the children’s spare time is taken up with weeding and grooming the grave plots, a task not appreciated by a certain minority of the village folk, who believe the practice impious.
"Realism" is one of the dirtiest words in RPG Internet discussions. Has been for years. D&D fanboys are especially touchy where it's concerned (understandably so, given D&D), as well as the various pedants huffily proclaiming that "fantasy" CAN'T be "realistic," and that we ought to be using "verisimilitude" or "emulation" instead.
(Whatever. "Realism" is the word in common use. When I addressed a condolence card to a friend who lives in the state southeast of mine, I didn't address it to "The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations." I mailed it to Rhode Island. If you can't work with terms in popular circulation, the heck with it.)
So by this point I have a sticky response to the issue, which originates from a RPGnet discussion several years ago. To wit:
Forum D00D: I think the real question here is, "why do you consider the mechanics nonsense"? We're talking an imaginary dwarf, with 100 imaginary hit points, falling off an imaginary cliff, taking damage that is, also, imaginary. If the designer finds it desirable that a character could fall off a cliff and survive, it will be so. If not, for whatever reason, it will not be. (The first mention of "but it's not REALISTIC!" gets you kicked. This is all *imaginary*, remember?)
If I had a dime for every time I've heard this over the last couple decades, I could pay all the bills this month.
Well, yes, it's all imaginary. So why use cliffs, or indeed any recognizable terrain at all? Why not adventure in big fluffy masses of amorphia? Or just teleport to anywhere we want to go, and imagine it to be anything convenient to us?
Why should we use perfectly recognizable medieval weaponry? It's imaginary, isn't it? Don't limit yourself, hit the enemy with your kerfluffmezoz or your wheezimithuzit!
And since it doesn't have to make sense, we don't need to have these pesky movement rules, besides which we all want to be Matrixy and John Woo-esque, don't we? Tell your DM that you're running through the air and phasing right through every intervening tree and foe to hit the Big Bad with your wheezimithuzit, and better yet you're doing it before he cut down your friend, because since it's all imaginary we don't have to use linear time either.
No, I don't care that I rolled a "miss." Skill progression is one of those boring "realism" things, and I don't believe in it. Let's just imagine that I hit the Big Bad whenever I need to, and for twenty-five hundred d8 of damage, too. Encumbrance is boringly realistic too, so I’m ignoring it, and I’d rather imagine that my snazzy quilted vest protected me like the glacis armor on a T-72, please.
Alright, show of hands. Why don’t we play our RPGs that way?
It’s called suspension of disbelief. We put our games into recognizable settings that mimic real life. We use swords in fantasy games because we have the expectation that such milieus use swords, and those swords do the relative damage of a sword instead of the damage of a 155mm mortar shell because that is our expectation too. Our fantasy characters wear tunics and cloaks, live in walled cities or sacred groves, and scale ramparts where the force of gravity pulls us downward, not pushes us up. We have an expectation of how fast we can walk, how far we can ride, and how long we can sail. All these expectations are founded in -- wait for it -- reality.
To the degree we ignore these things, just because, we lose touch with suspension of disbelief. If the ten-foot-tall Big Bad hits a peon with his greatsword, we expect the peon to be in a world of hurt; we don’t expect the sword to bounce off. If the party wizard shoots a fireball at the orcs’ wooden stockade, we expect that it might catch fire; we don’t expect the wall to grow flowers instead.
And if an armored dwarf takes a gainer off of a hundred foot sheer drop, we expect to find a soggy mass at the base of the cliff. We sure as hell don't expect a dwarf boinging around like a rubber ball, happily warbling, "Bumbles bounce!"
That there are a great many gamers who want their rule systems to reflect reality, rather than ignore it -- so that we find ourselves constantly sidetracked as to issues of WHY suchandsuch doesn't make sense, or because the GM has to explain how come the dwarf isn't a soggy mass -- ought be a surprise to no one.
Why is it such a surprise to you?
My job, as a GM, isn't to preserve the life of the bad guy. It's to provide the players a fun gaming experience.
Take one of the classic plot elements: the party has run down a den of Evil Henchmen, destroying the operation and killing or otherwise neutralizing all of said henchmen. Huzzah, they take the clues and info they've gotten from the scene and have dashed off.
Flip that around: you're a PC. You've got some manner of base: either it's your home base, or it's some operation you have going, or it's the manor you were given when the Queen knighted you, or it's the business you bought with the proceeds from two adventures ago, hoping that it'd make some cash for you. And you drop in to check on it, and the place has been tossed and trashed. The staff you hired are all dead or vanished. The guards you hired are decaying piles of gore.
So what do you do? Shrug, murmur "That's life," and go on your merry way?
That's exactly what most PCs expect the Big Bad to do, in any event.
Hell with that. If I'm a PC, and my satellite operation was trashed and everyone killed, and I have no idea who did it, that's going to change real frigging fast. I'm going to hire a wizard to do divination magic/check security footage. I'm going to spread some coin around the neighborhood to see if anyone saw or heard anything. I'm going to do my level best to find out if there were any survivors, and I'm going to be very interested in speaking to any. I'm going to increase security on anything else I have going to the limit of my capability. I'm going to get some investigators on the pawnshops (or going through Craigslist ...) to see who might be selling my stolen valuables.
And I'm going to set the best ambush I can for those bastards, so that I can put their severed heads on the graves of my people, and prove to the survivors that no one screws with me or them with impunity. There won't be frontal assaults ... I have no problem with a crossbow/rifle in the back of the head at 50 yards as one of the bastards is walking down the street, or a spear coming up through the privy hole.
If I don't have the juice to do those things? Then I haul out my exit strategy. I hear Linalda's Pool is peaceful this time of year.
I like reaction rolls for a particular reason, and it's exacerbated by my combat LARP experience.
Sitting in the GM's chair, in a comfy position, with a mug of steaming tea at my hand, I'm far removed from actually being in a stress situation. I know everything that's going on, I know everything that's offstage, I have unparalleled knowledge of the situation in a fashion we couldn't possibly have in real life.
But the world doesn't work like that. The fog of war is real. People don't always see what's going on, people don't always know what's going on, and people often guess wrong even if they have all the information.
In that LARP, I was one of the chief national leaders, and my character was the most powerful wizard in the game. I had to make a lot of decisions:
* Based on information that people told me, colored by their own prejudices or flawed insights.
* Based on the fact that I hadn't gotten any sleep the night before.
* Based on the fact that I hadn't gotten any sleep because the bastard, in my face and telling me I had to do something, was partying all night long two tents down the row.
* Based that I'd reinjured my chronically bad knee two hours before and it was hurting, a lot.
* Based on whether I trusted people or not, based on what I thought I could get away with politically or not.
* Based on my own prejudices, flawed insights, or whether or not I hated Soandso’s guts.
* Based on me just not knowing what I needed to know, and being forced to make a WAG.
Sometimes I got it right. Sometimes I got it wrong. Sometimes I played the odds exactly as I should have, and the odds just fell the wrong way.
Those are all variables impossible to calculate for each and every NPC. I just figure that no matter how smart someone is (or isn't), how capable someone is (or isn't), how well informed someone is (or not) ... sometimes they have bad days. Or very good days.
Heck, the last run I GMed was heavily colored by a NPC making a terrible reaction roll and thus reacting badly to the situation, no matter how much my wife's character was trying to talk sweet reason into him. Sometimes it happens. Random rolls are a good way to emulate that.
Yeah, but what if the NPC’s interacted with the party a number of times before. So what? Surely many NPCs have good days and bad ones. Heck, I'm very much a good day-bad day person. Catch me on a good day, and I'll be all accommodating about your request or inquiry. Catch me on a pain-filled day after a night of short sleep? I'm likely to be snarky, and sometimes stubbornly so.
Come to that, my first wife was even more capricious, and in all too many of our fights, I'd pull up short, incredulous that we were fighting as hard as all of that over such a petty thing, and ask "Alright, what is this really about?" Invariably, she'd pull up short, and reveal the subject which was really preying on her mind, something usually having nothing to do with me but about which I could be supportive and help defuse things.
I've kept this in mind when having a NPC snark-out, and a few times the more empathetic PCs have asked, by way of being supportive of their friend and helping to defuse things, "Hey, Nath, you seem like something's got you well off your feed. Anything it'd do you good to get off your chest?" Nice hook for a sideplot ...
I ran a Firefly campaign for a bit – and would love to run one again. The campaign was based out of Twilight Station, in the middle of the Black, floating above a pastoral planet of religious fanatics. It was something of an interstellar truck stop, with a bunch of businesses, and run by unregenerate Browncoats who were seeking to jump start the Lost Cause.
The group was stranded there, but won a decommissioned war surplus gunboat in a poker game, which became their new ship – Nightwind. Unfortunately, Nightwind came with an extra: a fellow who claimed to be the ship’s medic. They tried to run him off, but he waved what he said was an ironclad contract for him to be ship’s crew for three years or until he got tired of it, with a guaranteed rate of pay. Not much they could do about it, so onboard he stayed.
Ruy Sanchez Koriskevich O’Higgins is a bit of a whack job. He’s swarthy, with piercing black eyes, and long post-Civil War era hair and mustache ... the hair which he dyes mauve. Go figure. He’s keeps a shortsword scabbarded to his side, heaven knows why. Don’t get between him or anyone he feels like beating down, either, because he fights like a wounded weasel and doesn’t really know when to stop.
He’s also a bit of a pain in the ass aboard ship. He’s a devotee of Feng Shui (whatever the heck that is) and has a habit of rearranging the wardroom furniture and cargo pallets to suit notions of “positioning” ... and if you ask him to explain, the answer is so laden with jargon you never understand. He also claims to be seeking “satori” (whatever the heck that is), and frequently is doing yoga routines, which he insists on following through no matter the emergency.
Still, he’s a good doc, nothing much ever fazes him, he’s a middling shot, he’s fast as hell, and he’ll always throw in to whatever scheme the crew proposes ... including smuggling, which he’s altogether good at doing ...
One thing not readily apparent (and which he’ll conceal from the crew) is that he took permanent damage from chemical agents in the War. As a result, he doesn’t eat much (and will throw up if he tries), he’s unusually susceptible to toxins, his senses are dulled, he can easily tolerate very cold temperatures, and he’s just not as physically capable about a third of the time.
ST: 11 DX: 14 IQ: 13 HT: 11 Per: 10 Will: 14 Speed: 6
Advantages: Cultural Familiarity/Black, Reduced Consumption / 2/3rds food, Temperature Tolerance+1, Unfazeable
Disadvantages: Berserk (12); Compulsive Behavior / Wanderlust; Disciplines of Faith / "Satori;" Odious Personal Habit / “Feng Shui;” Susceptibility to Poison; Sense of Duty / Crew; War Wounds / -2 everything, on a 9- or less, for two hours
Skills: Area Knowledge/Black-13; Boxing-14; Calligraphy-12; Crew/Spacer-13; Diagnosis-13; Fast-Draw/sword-14; First Aid-16; Free Fall-13; Gardening-13; Guns/pistol-14; Housekeeping-13; Meditation-13; Philosophy-11; Physician-14; Pressure Points-14; Shortsword-15; Smuggling-13; Surgery-14
Quirks: Bombastic around women; Constantly snacking (but only nibbles); Eats tapioca pearls in drink; Twirls his mustache compulsively
Cultural Familiarity is knowing the customs and suchlike of an area to which you're not native. Odious Personal Habit, in GURPS terms, is a reaction roll penalty for something about you which is obnoxious enough to bug people.
For further explanation of system numbers, check this link.
I've participated in a number of collaborative gaming lists on various sites. The Small Town Horror post I put up a while back was one. This is another. As part and parcel of any rational setting, you're going to have couples as NPCs. Sometimes those romances are more out there and turbulent than others; here are my parts of a collaboration for lovers. I don't give stats or details -- for a change, plug them in where you'd want them!
The punch line is that, in every case, these are from prominent characters from my own campaign ... or that I've played one side myself as a PC in either tabletop, a MMORPG or a LARP.
My Chemical Romance: Whether business partners, next door neighbors, rivals, forced allies or arranged spouses, this couple can’t stand each other. They agree on practically nothing, always trying to score points off of one another, and lose few opportunities to backbite (or even backstab) the other. Periodically the hostility breaks into a vicious fight ... which inevitably ends in screaming, clawing, prolonged sex, until the parties are sore and exhausted. He hotly denies they’re actual lovers, she coolly denies it, and they show no signs of any rapport whatsoever the moment the clothes go back on.
Class Ringwearers: Gosh, they’re so in love! Why they just celebrated their three-month “anniversary” and his class ring hangs around her neck! By the standards of their culture, they’re underage and/or immature. The grownups around them are patronizingly dismissive of their “crushes,” and they’re about ready to scream the next time anyone uses the term “puppy love” around them. Increasingly angry, they’re on the verge of doing something their culture would consider drastic: having sex, getting pregnant, running off to get married, publicly disavowing any arranged future marriage ... whatever it takes to get people to take their love seriously and recognize that it’s for real and forever!
Pre-Raphaelites: She’s a celebrated artist. He’s her model. His face and body have been immortalized in a half-dozen well-known compositions, and his own poetry -- though somewhat amateurish -- shows the illumination of her soul. But to touch one another would mar the artistic purity of their collaboration (and age, class and possibly marital barriers intrude) ... so for years now they’ve suffered in silence, unable to consummate their relationship, unwilling to part and so lose each other’s muse.
Bennifer: They were Yesterday’s Supercouple ... rich, celebrated, the hit of their social circle and so totally wrapped up in one another. But that was then, and events have pulled them apart. Their lives are going in different directions (well, in truth, they always did) and the spark is gone, however much they’re not particularly willing to admit it. ‘Tis a pity that everyone still expects to see them together, harmonious and dazzling as ever, and the act is wearing thin.
Mutt & Jeff: They don’t have a thing in common ... everyone knows it, they freely admit it. He’s neat and she’s sloppy, she’s athletic and he’s intellectual, he’s dynamic and she’s live-and-let-live, she’s a gourmet and he’s steak-and-potatoes. Yet when their orbits intersect, they live and love in tender harmony. No one knows how they do it, and well-meaning people keep trying to pry them apart in favor of “more compatible” partners ... to no avail.
Bonnie & Clyde: Yep, they’re in love, since the moment they met. She loves the exciting times he shows her, and he loves the ebullience and intensity of her spirit. They’re also complete sociopaths, perfectly eager to rape, kill, pillage and torture their way around the landscape. The wind’s at their backs, their luck is in, and their hands are dripping red. If they’re doomed to a bad end, they don’t know it (and might not even care): their focus is only on the next jaunt, the next meal, the next kill.
Putting On The Ritz: See them on the dance floor (or on the concert stage, or performing as a duo at the local Ren Faire, or the ice dancing Nationals ...) and they’re silken smooth. They’re just arresting to watch, and the aura about them is tangible – their eyes follow one another like magnets. But this activity and their athleticism are all that really links them, and they’re awkward and uneasy with one another away from the spotlight. You could scarcely recognize them, with that vast luminosity of theirs shuttered, and two plain, ordinary people left behind.
Hunk-A-Hunk-A-Burnin-Love: They can’t keep their hands off of one another. Ever. At every conceivable opportunity they’re stealing off for sex of any sort, and in a night camp they don’t bother much with sleep. Whether wild and clawing, or completely vanilla, they’re screaming with passion at all manner of inconvenient times. They’re constantly sore and exhausted, but they not only don’t give a damn, they always have those obnoxiously smug, creamy smiles on their faces after.
Double Blind: She’s the city’s -- and maybe the realm's -- most powerful wizard, and a gifted enchanter and scholar. He’s an elven prince of a dynasty older than Time, and one of the world’s great swordmakers. But they both wanted to live simple lives (and find someone who loved them for themselves, not their fame), and both have been slumming with the gypsies: he works as a blacksmith, and she keeps a very discreet magical watch over the encampment. She’s now pregnant and happily keeping his wagon for him, and neither of them have any idea of one another’s true identity, a difficulty which preys on them both.
Á la lanterne!: He’s a key player in the revolutionary government. She’s an actress devoted to smuggling out of the city the “traitorous class” the newly-ensconced rebels are seeking to execute, for their “crimes.” Honestly, she was only pretending to seduce him just to get him out of the way for a few hours while the rest of the party did the mission ... and things got far, far out of hand. He knows who she is, now, and neither of them are comfortable with how far they’re compromising their genuine beliefs with one another. If his comrades knew, he’d be executed; her comrades do know, and while they take advantage of the access, they don’t care for the relationship. Nonetheless, the lovers are devoted to one another and can’t bear to separate.
Miss me?: He was rich, powerful, handsome, brilliant. She was sixteen years old and a fresh, unplucked flower. He moved on, with his cronies, as he always had ... until six years later, when she returned with his only known heir. He won’t marry her and she wouldn’t have him, and they’re both at the opposite ends of a vast gulf of class, wealth and bitterness, but they’re forced into cooperation for the sake of the child. And she remains beautiful and incandescent, and he remains handsome and debonair, and they both hate themselves for the simmering desire for one another they still find they feel.
Ever After: The duke’s daughter and the princess’ son were content enough to marry; they were of the right age, betrothed as children, and had no objections to one another. A pair of unique wedding bands were wrought, out of living crystal, by the King’s Enchantress ... and, in a spirit of fun, the duke’s daughter put on hers two days before the wedding, while the young prince’s best friend put the matching band on his finger. They turned gazes towards one another ... and were enraptured. Now they’re fleeing for the border, with household troops in hot pursuit, completely unaware that the rings were enchanted to cause love between the wearers, as a kindness by the wizard towards an arranged couple.
Soulmates: They finish one another’s sentences. They seem to read one another’s thoughts. They absolutely anticipate one another’s needs. They apparently have the same skill set. They’re always together (and seem badly out of sorts and dissonant if forced to be apart for too terribly long), and seem to savor the same activities and hobbies. They were even raised in the same small neighborhood/estate/village, and share the same background and memories. (Alright, it's a pity that they're brother and sister, and even in their tolerant culture going that last step is out of bounds, even if they weren't high nobility and destined for arranged marriages.)
Days of Wine and Roses: She’s all of sixteen years old, and one of her agemates raised by the Wise and Patient Teacher – plucked from the deeps of Time itself to be their tutor – to be one of the prophesied group who would stand against the Darkness. She’s diligently learned all his martial arts skills, and already is a formidable fighter. But now, coming to the Big City, they’ve realized that the time and place from which “Teacher” was plucked are here and now. They've met him, and he's decades younger, at the height of his powers. She realizes she’s a woman after all, and she wants to be his ... and be damned to the risk to the timestream.
There’ve been a couple recent forum threads – and many others over the years – where some posters not only stated that their games don’t involve romance, relationships or any manner of sexuality, not only stated that they’re disinterested in such elements, but went on to express their incredulity that anyone else was and their dismay that any references to the same appeared in published adventure scenarios.
I don't understand this. For my part, I've been involved in romantic plotlines from the beginning; my very first character, back in 1978, wound up in a politically advantageous marriage with the daughter of a high government official. I've had four PCs married to the characters of other players. (We won't mention the number of marriages and relationships I've had in LARPs and MMORPGs. I can't count that high.)
From the other side of the dice, a great deal of plot has stemmed from romantic entanglements. In my most recent groups, the only PC in one who wasn't romantically involved was a priest of a faith that preaches rigid monogamy. In the second, two PC aristocrats married each other to preempt their families from dynastic shenanigans. A key element in my wife's one-on-one sessions is the need to keep her young daughter relatively free of the risk of assassination.
A “distraction to the plot,” as many of the antis claim? Heck, any kind of roleplaying is. Characterization involves ties, bonds, limitations, phobias ... all that can get in the way of a mission. Why, people might be moved by a NPC's pleadings and act other than coldly or logically!
Damn, that leaves out likes, dislikes and character quirks, too. That moron who always insists on wearing red screws up the pattern-disruptive outfit. The fellow who likes cheap tobacco always smells of it, and that can tip off guard dogs. So you want to fight "honorably," blah blah blah ... screw that, just go and do the guy from behind, less risky that way. Every last little quirk is someone demanding some distracting center-stage time – even if it's but moments – to light up her pipe, recite a prayer over the bodies of the fallen, scritch his cat, grab her favorite pizza or read a few pages from a trashy novel during a lull on the stakeout. Ego stroking drama queens, the lot of them. Right?
In gaming groups mature enough to handle the subject (which I agree many aren't), romance is another aspect of the human condition, just as valid for PCs to explore and roleplay as any other. Strange though this might seem to some, not all campaigns are about nothing but the tactical resolution of problems set before the team.
You might ask, "What's the point of having a PC belong to a guild, if it'll only result in trouble - they want help, your status is imperiled, the chapterhouse burns down and they want money from you?" Why bother with the PC having a family, when family members only drag you down in like fashion? Why belong to a church, which only restricts your actions and movements, except in so far as your setting requires it to get clerical aid? Why be a military veteran, because the only time your ex-mates will ever show up is when they're in trouble? Why have neighborhood ties, because getting to know the kindly old priestess at St. Taria's or the tomato seller on the corner just means you're getting sucked into their problems?
And why is it that these questions generally aren't asked, not with one tenth the frequency of angry questions about "Why bother with SOs?" Why is it that ties and plothooks involving PCs are so much more tolerated when the dreaded "R" word isn't a factor?
Simple.
We have a hobby with deeply misogynistic roots: one that stretched back to a day where rooms full of men and boys played wargames with lead miniatures. The games that stemmed from those were overwhelmingly based around tactical, statistical combat and nothing but. The problems set before the group to solve were dungeons, involving nothing beyond problem solving, tactical acumen, outguessing the Dungeon Master and dice luck. Players who could tell you in great detail that they "were" 8th level Lawful Good clerics with Wisdom 17, 36 hit points, Bracers of Wondrous Awesomeness and +3 Maces of Big Bad Smiting gave you blank looks when asked to name their hometowns, describe the clothing they wore or to expound on the doctrine of their deities ... when they'd bothered to name their deities at all, not always the case. The notion that roleplaying = acting wasn't common; third person "My character tells the NPC to back off" modes of speech were.
Quite aside from women not being welcome in that world – what stereotype of female players dominated the first decade of the hobby as heavily as the GM's Girlfriend, generally bored, mocked as incompetent and always marginalized? – romance and sexuality weren't either. Oh, sure, a lot of groups regularly patronized the local brothel ... along with locker room grunts and grins, and the dropping of a requisite few gold pieces. All suitably off-stage, with the (inevitably Frazettaesque-female) courtesans never seen or described, let alone named, extant only as part of some peculiar backslapping ritual affirming its participants as Manly Men.
And to a bunch of 14-year-old boys sitting around the table, clutching their dice, each concerned that they've never been laid and worried that they never will be, I'm willing to give a pass. But for everyone else?
Leaving aside those for whom gaming isn't roleplaying, and is solely about tactics, is there any more reason for sniggering than with any other type of plot, if you have a group not comprised of adolescent boys? Alright, let's get the 800 lb elephant out in the open and admit the secret fear lurking in the hearts of many gamers: that the (invariably male) PC having a serious relationship with the NPC (run by the invariably male GM) will carry a whiff of homosexuality.
(I'm quite serene with my stereotyping, because the number of these complaints coming from female players, with the exception of the I'm Freaking Tired Of His PC/NPC Trying To Get Into My Bodice riff, is about 1/100th those from male players.)
How to get past this, that's a question for which I don't have answers beyond an admittedly pompous and patronizing hope that more gamers just plain grow up.
How long have I been talking about gaming? Over thirty years, at this point. I was part of the Alarums & Excursions APA from 1979 for a few years. The first online gaming forum in which I indulged was on the UMass computer system in 1983. I've been in other APAs and many an online forum.
In all those places, what we expect from our fellow gamers is a matter of constant debate. What classes they play, whether they buy into PvP or not, whether one can play evil in a good party or good in an evil party, whether people should conform their expectations or proudly dissent. "Murderhoboing," niche protection, how "paladins" or priests ought to behave, we're vitally concerned with how the other character acts, and we drone on at startling length and persistence on the subject.
We're far less concerned with how the player acts, oddly enough. But that's as much of a make-and-break as anything else, wouldn't you think? What I want from my players is ...
* Regular attendance. Someone who misses as many as a quarter of my sessions is teetering on the edge. I do not run one of those drop-in games where it's okay to blow us all off if there's a baseball game you'd rather watch on TV or you just don't feel like shaving.
* Buying in. By virtue of showing up, you're telling me you're willing to play the system I play, in the milieu and genre I'm using, in my homebrew setting, and that you intend to conform to the group you're joining.
* Good behavior. We're all adults here. If you're going to be terribly late, you call. If you can't make it, you call or e-mail. You pay attention to my game, not to your Words With Friends app on your cellphone. You leave your cigarettes and alcohol at home, and you don't jeer at my cats, kick people in the head or spit in the snacks. (These last three were not cited at random.)
* Good neighbors. Everyone brings some kind of light snack, and everyone takes turns buying/cooking a meal, since we do eight hour sessions and that's a long time to go without a bite. Chronically arriving a half hour late so you don't have to deal with the pre-game socializing is unfriendly. (That isn't cited at random either.)
* Knowledge. After a certain point, I don't want to have to keep teaching you the rules. Learn enough of them to pull your weight, or else reconcile yourself to the fact that your tactical options are going to be limited to "I attack him with my weapon." I want people invested enough in my gameworld to learn about it, and while I don't quiz people on the handouts, I see no reason why more interested players have to keep coaching the slackers on the basics. As in any other field of human endeavor, you get out of it when you put into it.
* Trust. I am not an adversarial GM. I am here to provide the setting with which you interact, not to provide an omniscient, omnipotent, malevolent force Out To Screw You. If you can't trust me to do that, to be fair, judicious and reasonable, we ought not be playing together. Whoever did you dirt in the past, I'm not that guy.
* Motivation. Shouldn't you be here to play the game, not simply be a passive spectator for my storytelling? That being said, adventures are -- usually -- about conflict. Accept this. Your backstory isn’t immune to being mined for plotlines, the people you know and meet aren’t immune to being mined for plotlines. Someone who deliberately refuses to give me any handles concedes that adventures will never be about you; only about someone else. I’m not terribly interested in that kind of player.
* Honesty. If you've got a problem or an issue, I'd like to know it. If you can't hack any of the rules above, I'd like to know that too. Passive-aggressive sullenness does not impress me; I believe that mature adults should be able to have open, honest and civil discussion of their grievances like, well, mature adults ought to do. Problems never go away on their own. And if any of the above is too much for you -- or isn’t the game you want to play -- I hope you're honest enough to give my campaign a miss and not waste anyone's time, your own included. (Don’t worry. I won’t be offended. Should I be offended if you’re not into any of the other things I’m into, from hockey to singing classical music to walking in forests to writing nautical folk songs?)
