Land of a Thousand Autumns: Introduction (#1)

Nearly a decade ago, as a teenager, I was exposed to two pieces of media that left a real impact on me: Hayao Miyazaki’s legendary Princess Mononoke, and the Tales of the Otori trilogy by Australian author Lian Hearn.

Both presented a mythicized fantastical version of Japan, using the supernatural as a lens to draw out and enhance the cultural distinctiveness of tribes and ethnic groups that had once roamed the islands.

Both were also infused with classic Buddhist themes - impermanence, fleeting beauty, mortality and morality - and the most integral conflict in traditional Japanese fiction: the clash between giri (duty) and ninjo (human feeling).

Years later, around the age of 18, I was exposed to a game that called back to these works: Timothy Kleinert’s The Mountain Witch.

Though I remain unconvinced about certain aspects of that game mechanics, I was compelled by its atmosphere, the story it framed, and the basic premise of a Reservoir-Dogs-style blood opera of betrayal and suspicion. I was also deeply impressed by my favourite mechanic from the game: the giving and spending of Trust, which enables the rōnins’ passage up the mountain (through teamwork) but becomes a knife in their hands when their secrets and destinies turn them in on each other at the end.

The Mountain Witch is a game I’ve been coming back to for almost 5 years now: I’ve run it straight, written alternate mechanics to fit around the Trust system, discussed it and loved it.

Someday, if I’m lucky, I may even get to play it.

***

In 2015, inspired by the existence of a Mountain Witch hack for playing desperate soldiers in an Apocalypse Now-like context, I drew from all the parts of the game I loved to create my second convention game: To Tread the Spiral Path.

“Mythic Ireland. Five outcasts quest for a chance to regain their honour and place in society.

Five warriors, five wanderers, five exiles. Bear, Fox, Hare, Lynx, Wolf. Five lost souls offered a chance to reverse their exile.

These three things stand in their way: the spirits and little gods of the Otherworld; a druid dark and rotten as the corpse of a kinslayer; the weakness and frailty that doomed each to exile and leads them on towards a tragic wyrd.”

It was an excellent con.

I ran the game 9 times, and all but one session embodied the tonal and thematic ideas – uncertainty, betrayal and trust, the bonds of honour versus the bonds of feeling – that I had responded to in The Mountain Witch and set out to explore and evolve.

 And at some point, in that fruitful void between what I remembered and learned from the con and a rewatch of Princess Mononoke a few weeks after, the seed of another game was planted.

***

Land of a Thousand Autumns is that game.

It is a mythic Japanese setting filled with tribal peoples drawn from Japanese history and folklore, strange magics and gods, and dangers that duty demands must be confronted whatever the cost.

It is inspired by the “symbolic neverwhen clash of three proto-Japanese [cultures]” presented in Princess Mononoke and the clear cultural barriers that separate social groups – the nobility, the monks of Maruyama, the pacifistic Hidden, the Tribe – in Tales of the Otori.

It is concerned with that same set of themes: loyalty and trust, uncertainty and betrayal, the ways we make relationships on an individual level and to higher concepts: religion, tribe and village, culture.

It aims to tell stories of tribal champions sent out to deal with the threats that endanger the precarious survival of their people. It aims to tell stories of the heavy burdens these champions carry, the hopes and fate of their people and the chains of duty and obligation. It aims to tell stories about the messy ways that people come to love and connect with each other, and how the heart is just as dangerous as sorcery or the sword.

At heart, Land of a Thousand Autumns is a game about people with strong ties to their village and culture and heavy obligations to them, torn between the demands of those duties and the human feeling they have found in their fellows. 

I ran a conceptual playtest (an alpha test, to borrow Australian convention-writing parlance) back in November to see if the idea was worth running with. I learned (with total consensus from players) that the answer was yes, and learned more besides about the structure and nature of the game.

Currently I've finished a round of updating the basic moves and playbooks, and am starting to look at another playtest once I get the GM stuff for the first session worked out. 

I hope to report back soon!

Across the Endless Sea: Introduction (#1)

When I was around 11, my mother brought me a compiled edition of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.

It was a thing of beauty: tall and hardbound, and very heavy indeed to my child’s hands. The front cover was blazoned with a watercolour map of Narnia, giants marching and Aslan’s great head peering out at me. I must have read it a dozen times cover-to-cover as a child, my insatiable hunger for fantasy latching on to the world presented within.

I loved all of the Narnia books, but my favourite was the Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

These days my relationship to Narnia, and Lewis’ work, is more complicated. The sheer transparency with which he parallels Christian motifs and symbols I find jarring; his treatment of Susan (and Lucy) I find uncomfortable. But still, I find a magic in reading about the Dawn Treader’s voyage across the sea into the East: about the islands encountered along the way and the mermaid kingdoms just below the surface of the ocean. 

It’s a magic that’s far from unique to C. S. Lewis, of course.

The closing chapters of A Wizard of Earthsea, as Ged departs to chase his shadow and sails the Archipelago, have the same wonder (as do parts of its sequel The Farthest Shore).

Terry Brooks’ trilogy The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara spends the first and third books telling of an airship voyaging across strange and distant seas, sailing amidst the clouds and stopping at strange and enchanted islands, and captures the same essence.

The ancient Irish folktales of Immrama concerned the same motifs, as do animated films like Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas and Kubo and the Two Strings.

Even works like Moby Dick and its many cousins have something of the quality in question about them.

There is a long and proud tradition in storytelling of this motif: the surreal fantastical voyage across uncharted and dream-like seas. Bizarre creatures lurking in the deeps below, savage weather raking the deck, islands and impossible encounters delaying the journey’s progress.

And so, Across the Endless Sea

Across the Endless Sea is a storygame, a collaborative experience for up to five players chronicling the voyage of the People (as they call themselves) through the Endless Sea.

I’m going to be chronicling the design process publically here on this blog, opening the refinement of this inchoate game up to outside scrutiny and hopefully starting a dialogue of commentary and feedback that will allow me to make this game better, stronger, and stranger than I could have on my own.

Mechanics-wise, I’m going to be borrowing from the Playbook/Move structure of Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World, and the innovation of having each player take on both a protagonist and an aspect of the story’s antagonism from Avery Alder’s Dream Askew.

My goal is to create a game that captures that feeling of wonder and dream-like reverie that I loved in Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a child.

• I want it to be GMless, not least so that I actually get a chance to play it (unlike anything else I write).
• I want it to be inspiring, the text capturing a mood to put the players in the game’s tone and mood.
• I want it to be invisible, a framework that helps create great stories and guides creativity in organic and unobtrusive ways.
• I want it to play with ideas of collaboration and opposition in RPGs/storygames, allowing fluid movement between the roles of environment and explorers.
• I want it to leave a space open for groups to shape their emotional landscape: longing, or bittersweet, or joyous, or desperate, as the group deems appropriate.
• I want to be able to release it for first-stage playtesting on my Patreon by the end of April.

A Fresh Start

I’ve been away for a while (what’s it been, like 5 months?), but gamesfromthewildwood is now officially back online.

Now that I’ve completed my Anthropology degree I’ve got a lot more time free than I did last year, so I’m going to spend 2017 making up for all the RPG goodness (both playing and GMing) I had to miss out on while writing my thesis.

I’m moving away from the previous style of this blog (mostly play reports from games I GM) as something that takes time away from the actual playing and running of games, and more towards new kinds of material.

So: new year, new content, new blog. What can you actually look forward to on here from now on?

• Snapshots of my game design process for whichever storygame or microgame I’m currently working on. The project first up is a collaborative storytelling game about surreal fantastical sea journeys called Across the Endless Sea.
• Homebrew content for a variety of published games, including 5^th Edition Dungeons & Dragons and Avery Alder’s brilliant Monsterhearts.
• Thoughts on the art of GMing and the broad mechanics and themes of roleplaying games, some of it advice/tips/tricks and some more abstract theory.
• Behind-the-scenes material for All Things Under Heaven, my upcoming online campaign that will be streaming on my Twitch channel. This includes the various systems and house rules for the game, dungeons that have been resolved, original mechanics and races, and setting posts.
• Reflections on GMing for children and young people from my decade-long employment doing just that. This will include techniques and principles that I hope folks may find useful for introducing their offspring (or other youngsters) to the hobby.
• Mechanizing (or making gameable) concepts from anthropology and history that speak to me or I feel are well-suited to find a place in people’s campaigns and one-shots.
• Updates on Land of a Thousand Autumns, my mythic-Japanese PbtA game of clan obligation and personal feeling, and reflections on playtests and the overall design process.
• Other assorted snippets, including: microsettings or game ideas, half-abandoned design thoughts, updates on the progress of my game for this year’s Phenomenon (an excellent Australian roleplaying convention), and thoughts on and personal experiences with the Australian roleplaying scene.

I’m looking at a twice-weekly schedule, probably publishing one post mid-week and another during the weekend.

During weeks and months when I’m particularly productive or I have a lot to report I may post more often, but my hope is to stick with two posts every week unless work commitments make that impossible in a given period (the intensity of my workload is variable).

I'm looking forward to talking shop with y’all, and hope you stick around!