Shattered Mirrors: Introduction (#1)

So, Across the Endless Sea is finally finished, published, and out in the world. I wrote a game! It’s still a surreal feeling, and more so every time someone actually buys it or a game designer I respect helps to spread the word.

(If you haven’t seen it yet, you can check the game out at gamesfromthewildwood.itch.io/endlesssea).

With that project now done (pending expansions, etc), though, I find myself looking for the next project.

And there’s another very specific mini-genre/set of literary motifs dear to my heart that I’ve wanted to see a good game about for years.

I love stories about children travelling to fantasy Otherworlds.

I always have. From the whimsy of Alice in Wonderland to the poignant darkness of Pan’s Labyrinth, there’s something about that archetype of crossing the threshold between the mundane and magical on a bildungsroman-style journey that speaks to me.

Now, there are already games about that.

The main one I’m familiar with is Heroine (I watched it played once, but didn’t get to play), but it’s more Labyrinth and Alice in Wonderland than what I’m picturing.

Because the stories about these Otherworldly coming-of-age journeys taken by children that I love are those that center on family. Stories about children with a lost mother or father, or estranged parents, or some other intimate familial trauma in their background.

Stories about children who find the members of their broken family doubled by creatures and figures in the Otherworld, and through their journey find some resolution of their troubles.

I’m thinking of Song of the Sea and Kubo and the Two Strings as recent examples of this motif, though casting the net wider also draws in works like Pan’s Labyrinth (the doubling isn’t explicit, but it’s there: Captain Vidal and the Pale Man, for example).

So once again I have a desire for a game that is far too specific to already exist, and thus no recourse but to design it myself.

So: Shattered Mirrors (name extremely placeholder, please suggest something better).

I think this will be a smaller game than Across the Endless Sea: more intimate, and for fewer players.

This time it absolutely is a game about playing specific characters, and owning them and their secret pains.

Once again I think I’m going to borrow the basic language of playbooks and moves from Vincent Baker, as well as borrowing some of the ideas about distributing narrative authority/responsibility from Polaris. I also feel like this is going to be a very structured game: with a sequence of scenes framed by the various playbooks in specific order, playing to find out how things happen rather than necessarily what happens.

But those are thoughts for a future post. For now, like last time, I want to talk about design intentions.

So, my goal is to create a game that captures the sense of poignant longing for a family that is whole again that is core to the various source texts. I want antagonism to come from all characters, for everyone save the child to be culpable in the breakdown of the family, and for villains to be people who are hurting in their own ways.

• I want forgiveness and empathy to be the way to resolve problems, not violence and not rage.
• I want it be GMless, so all the players equally own the messy family drama that unfolds (and so I can play).
• I want it to build messy and broken family units whose love and issues both feel real.
• I want it to evoke both how magical and threatening the world is as a child, and the reality of children’s complexity and capabilities.
• I want to make use of ritual phrases. I really enjoyed them in Polaris, and I think it’s a shame more games don’t use them.
• I want to do something interesting for a mechanic. Perhaps something like Endless Sea, perhaps something new. I haven’t yet decided.
• I want to playtest it sometime in August, and hopefully release it for first-stage playtesting on my Patreon by mid-September.

All Things Under Heaven: Announcement & Introduction

All Things Under Heaven is a D&D 5th Edition sandbox and hexcrawl campaign in the tradition of Ben Robbins’ Grand Experiment, and Rollplay’s previous West Marches and ongoing Court of Swords campaigns.

I have been running it IRL for my home group since August of last year, and I am pleased to announce that starting this week I will also be running an online campaign via Twitch.

All Things Under Heaven will run weekly on my Twitch channel on Saturday 10am-2pm AEST (Friday 7pm to 11pm Eastern; Friday 4pm to 8pm Pacific; Friday 6pm to 10pm Central), and will be accompanied the following morning by a GM Turn in which I perform upkeep on the setting and ensure it is reacting dynamically to player actions.

***

All Things Under Heaven is a campaign that is very much in the weirder and more wondrous/inexplicable vein of fantasy that was common before responses to Tolkien became formulaic and neatly “high fantasy”. 

It features a strong emphasis on exploration and investigation, characters acting to change the world and being changed by it in turn, deep and layered lore that the players can peel back as far as they desire, and characters struggling against great danger to navigate a world that holds endless opportunity but is wilder, fiercer, older, and far stranger than they are.

I would like to acknowledge the brilliant work of Stephen Lumpkin on Rollplay’s West Marches, which was a major inspiration for the feel and mechanics of this campaign and some of whose ideas about character motivation I have adopted.

All Things Under Heaven is set in a mythic Asiatic-influenced world that draws inspiration from China and neighboring regions (Japan, India, Korea, Thailand & Vietnam, Indonesia, Hokkaido & Siberia), but does not attempt to present a coherent fantasy analogue to any one country or period.

It is a response to the diverse cultures and mythologies of Asia, one that is informed by my background in anthropology and history and aims to come from a place of respect and informed research and avoid appropriating or exoticizing traditions from that area.

It is inspired by the legendary history of China presented in the Bamboo Annals, the series of novels The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughart, recent works of media that respond respectfully to Asian cultures and mythologies like Avatar: the Last Airbender and Kubo and the Two Strings, anime that include Princess Mononoke, Mushishi, and Sword of the Stranger, and wuxia films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Another major inspiration is the work of Adam Koebel on Rollplay’s Court of Swords, which provided an excellent example how to respectfully invent a fantasy world that blends but does not misrepresent or appropriate the mythology of another set of cultures.

***

I'm very keen to share this with you all. 

My test stream last weekend went well, and I think the audio/video should be nice and clean. The overlay looked fantastic, especially for something made by a novice (me) on GIMP. 

My new players for this incarnation of the campaign have cooked up a fantastic set of characters (far more ambiguously-motivated than the IRL group, too...) and I look forward to sharing their adventures with you.

See you on the stream!

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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!