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.

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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.

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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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Updates & Progress

It’s going to have to be a short blog today, since all kinds of other stuff is going on.

When I set a twice-weekly schedule for this blog I thought it would be manageable. Largely, it has been.

When I then fixed certain days to that schedule, however, I never realized how hard it would be to keep to them. Wednesdays & Sundays has become Wednesdays & Weekend/Mondays, which isn’t the end of the world but I’d like to get a little more regular about in the coming weeks.

That said, a lot has been going on so I think I have a little bit of an excuse.

So:

• I finished the first draft of Across the Endless Sea! I just need to get it formatted as a single document and convert it to PDF, and the playtest preview will be going out on my Patreon.
• The weekend just gone I ran my first Twitch stream, and made many fruitful mistakes. Unfortunately, my screw-ups in the world of forgetting-to-record-other-people’s-audio means that y’all will never see the character creation ‘session’ for my new campaign, but at least it wasn’t the first session I mangled!
  (A post about my weekly Twitch campaign is going up on Wednesday with all the details about that).
• I somehow got suckered into another game design project, working with my good friend John Hughes on a system for anti-Lovecraftian humanist takes on cosmic horror in the tradition of Australian systemlessgaming.
• I need to dedicate more time to working on my con game for June. Hopefully that can be this week’s project.
• I was blown away by the response to my first article on GMing for Kids. The second, looking at the idea of making choices meaningful and centering agency, is coming along slow and steady.

Otherwise life goes on as normal for me: GMing for the kids at work, running for my home group, desperately trying to fit more hours into the day.  

I think that’s about all for now. Hope to see some of y’all in chat for my Twitch game sometime!

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Across the Endless Sea: Mechanics and Playbooks (#3)

(Across the Endless Sea is a storygame I’m writing, blogging the process here to entertain and hopefully get some advice/feedback. For the introductory post that lays out the design goals of the project, look here.)

I’ve had a week to think about last week’s draft for a resolution mechanic for Across the Endless Sea.

In that time, I’ve reread my Patreon preview of Vincent Baker’s The King is Dead. I’ve reread my copy of Jason Morningstar’s Skeletons. I’ve rewatched some of Adam Koebel’s games of A Sundered Land.

On Monday at work I sat with a bunch of kids making up stories: about their characters, about the campaigns, about key NPCs they admire. After a particularly beloved mentor died of old age, one kid very sincerely told me that “nothing happens to me, because I’ve died of a broken heart”.

Seeing the strength of the narrative moments that can be generated just through using commonsense/fairness and asking provocative questions, I’ve come to a decision:

There will be no randomization or dice in Across the Endless Sea.

They just feel unnecessary. There’s an existing body of storygames that demonstrate that diceless non-random games can be done, and done well.

I want Across the Endless Sea to have something of the feel of traditional storytelling, to lean into Vincent Baker’s model of “roleplaying as conversation”. I want, as I mentioned in my design goals, for the mechanics of this game to seem invisible.

I also want this to be a game that requires and teaches trust of the other players at the table.

(Trust in their integrity, trust in their creativity, trust in their support as you imagine and improvise.)

So, with all that in mind here’s another attempt at that core resolution mechanic, and one that I am much happier with:

Time passes, triggering an encounter. A random encounter prompt is drawn.

The group determines which Threat the encounter belongs to. The Threat player gets to answer some questions and maybe ask some leading questions to flesh out their vision of the encounter.

They then give an initial description of the encounter.

The rest of the group determines which Aspect player will meet the encounter.

The Aspect player gets to interrogate the fiction of the encounter before they resolve it. Each playbook gives them a list of questions to choose from; this lets the player signal what about the encounter interests them. It also lets them steer the encounter a little: creating openings or weaknesses.

The Aspect player then begins the encounter.

They choose (from a playbook list) how the People meet the encounter, and then draw on their earlier questions and the established resources of the People to describe what that looks like.

The Aspect player asks the Threat player if their course of action works. There are no mechanics for this; the Threat player considers what was described and what they know about the encounter and answers according to what seems fair and truthful.

IF the course of action works completely, the People win something.

IF the course of action works at a cost, the People win something and lose something.

IF the course of action doesn’t work, the People lose something and then the Aspect player has to choose a new course of action.

Whenever things are won or lost, the Aspect players gets another player to choose them;  (either off a playbook list or from scratch, as that player chooses).

So, there it is!

We now have five basic moves that are going to part of every Aspect playbook-

• One that determines the investigative questions you can ask
• One that determines the courses of actions you can take for resolution
• One that determines what may have been lost
• One that determines what may have been won
• One that establishes some fictional resources the People have access to through this Aspect

and then choices that design the encounter that occurs when the People reach their destination.

There needs to be a clear trigger for what sets off the encounter at the destination: at this point, I’m thinking that the game happens over the course of an in-fiction year.

Each month, there may be one or two encounters (at the players’ discretion) and once they come to the twelfth month the next encounter involves their destination and what happens there rather than the normal deck of prompts.

I loved the chapter on little cultural details that John Harper wrote for Blades in the Dark, so I might do something similar with the months and their traditions of the main rules sheet.

That’s about all for today, I think.

I’m currently halfway through drafting the Aspect playbooks, and things are looking promising. I’ll probably post some of that next time around, along with some thoughts about what the template of the Threat playbooks should be.

And then there’s the question of the encounter prompts…

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GMing for Children #1: Abstract Resources & Tangible Objects

The first time I picked up a set of dice and rolled up a character, I was 9 years old. The first time I got a taste of GMing I was 13.

For the last 7 and something years, since the age of 16, I’ve been employed as a professional GM for children and young people at a business that uses roleplaying to teach history, teamwork, problem-solving, and empathy.

Suffice then to say that I have some experience GMing for children.

How to introduce kids to RPGs is a perennial topic in the hobby, but it seems to be one that’s picked up traffic in recent years.

The original generation/s of roleplayers are now of an age to have children, and for those children to be old enough to read, and do addition and subtraction, and hold a conversation, and possess all those basic human skills necessary for roleplaying.

And so, of course, there is now a generation of kids being introduced to roleplaying by their parents.

Children are natural roleplayers already: they take on other roles and characters as easily as they breathe, they have a near limitless capacity for invention, their imaginations are boundless and creative beyond many artists and authors I know.

But while they have a natural inclination towards roleplaying, they are still children.

Certain aspects and demands of roleplaying games are difficult for them; certain skills required of players rely on patience and focus they may not yet have.

In order for kids to have the best possible experience as they’re introduced to roleplaying games, it helps to adjust some techniques and reassess some assumptions. That way the GM knows what to expect, and the players aren’t confronted by demands for which they aren’t yet developmentally prepared.

One of the major issues I’ve noticed over the years is children struggling with the abstractness of RPGs.

There is a lot of resource management in most RPGs, from the near-ubiquitous concept of hit points/health/similar equivalents, to the concept of spell slots or abilities limited per day in D&D (due to its popularity, the most common RPG used to introduce kids to gaming).

And these resources, in the default form of most games, are entirely abstract.

They are written down, tracked only in numbers and in the head of the player, and their proportional relationship – that hit was half of my HP, using a spell is a third of my resources – is intangible.

Children, particularly those between 7 and 10 (the main demographic I GM for) don’t do well with abstractness and intangible numbers.

They happily take hit after hit during fights, but are visibly shocked when eventually they look down and see they’ve only got 5 hit points left. They conserve all their spells slots through the day just in case and never end up spending them, or else blow them all on the first dice-roll of the day despite being warned they won’t get to rest and get them back.

The grasp on these numbers – of hit points, of spell slots, of limited-use abilities – necessary to manage them effectively eludes children, because in a very literal way these numbers aren’t real to them.

They can’t see them, they can’t count them as real things, they can’t touch them or feel them.

And so, I’ve found, the answer is to turn abstract resources into tangible objects.

Give them something that they can touch, and count in a way that’s sensory and meaningful. Give them something that they can visually identify is only half of what they started with, or a third, or a quarter, or only one left. Give them something that lets them understand the gravity of using a limited resource, or lets them feel the impact of losing an amount of hit points.

Give them coloured toothpicks for hit points that they have to snap as they lose them.

Give them spell-tokens, shiny and magical-feeling, that they must expend to use their arcane powers.

Give them cards for limited-use abilities, and better yet put the rules on them in child-friendly form.

You could even go so far as to make specific tokens for each type of thing they can do in a combat (a Movement, an Action, a Reaction) and reissue them at the start of each new round.

(There are already some games for adults that do this transformation of abstract resource into tangible objects brilliantly: filling in the Harm clock in Apocalypse World, turning a dice from side to side to track increasing insanity in Cthulhu Dark, using poker chips to track Trust tokens in the Mountain Witch, everything about the resolution mechanics in Dread and Ten Candles. Look to these games for inspiration.)

Make resources tangible. Make them meaningful.

Make them visceral, if you’d like and you think it will enhance the experience.

(The toothpick idea above is one attempt to do just that.)

Kids are more than capable of giving you some of the greatest RPG experiences of your life, and it’s an incredibly rewarding feeling to watch them create their first characters and let their imaginations flourish and run wild.

All you have to do is rethink some assumptions, give them a hand, and watch them fly.

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Across the Endless Sea: Structure and Game Resolution (#2)

(Across the Endless Sea is a storygame I’m writing, blogging the process here to entertain and hopefully get some advice/feedback. For the introductory post that lays out the design goals of the project, look here).

So, what does Across the Endless Sea look like as an actual game? This is the first and most important question that needs answering.

Every other mechanic and piece of writing must flow from this basic place: What is the structure of the game, and what is the resolution mechanic?

Let’s begin with structure.

Some years ago, I read Avery Alder’s Dream Askew: a GMless hack of Apocalypse World that presumes a slower-motion apocalypse and the formation of alternative and queered societal models to cope with this advancing frontier of weirdness and apocalyptica.

I haven’t yet got a chance to play it, but one thing stuck with me: players with multiple Playbooks to run.

In Dream Askew, every player is running two Playbooks at once: a character (slightly different from the normal AW list, but essentially similar) and a part of the world’s apocalyptic state.

The fictional tapestry controlled by the GM in Apocalypse World is carved up and parceled out among these “GM Playbooks” that give narrative authority over the aspect they describe: the world’s Psychic Maelstrom; a Warlord leading other survivors, violent and opportunistic; Grotesques and their cultists and believers.

Every player controls an aspect of the world and generates antagonism that originates from that thing. Every player controls a character who can confront the aspects of the world’s badness, except for one.

(Sidenote: The idea of making thematic statements by pre-determining these links is an interesting one. Whoever plays the Gunlugger must also play the Maelstrom; guns have no power over the bleeding psychic hole at the heart of the world. Whoever plays the Brainer must also play the Warlord; psychic fuckery cannot stop a soldiers well-led and armed with bullets. But this is a thought for another time…).

So: in Across the Endless Sea each player controls an Aspect of the People whose journey we tell the story of and a Threat of the Endless Sea upon which they travel.

This idea has been part of the game since very early on. One of the earliest things I wrote was:

• One set of them [Playbooks] represent the Aspects of the People (that’s what they call themselves). You might be the Heart of the People, the Hands of the People, the Eyes of the People, the Memory of the People, etc.. Your sheet offers choices that define some of the cultural practices and values of the People, and your Moves provide ways to interrogate the fiction regarding things that the Endless Sea presents and ways to overcome them.
• One set of them [Playbooks] represent the Threats of the Endless Sea. You might be the Weather of the Endless Sea, the Tides of the Endless Sea, the Islands of the Endless Sea, the Dwellers in/on the Endless Sea. Your sheet offers choices that define the environmental aesthetic of the game and the world the People move through. Your moves provide ways to flesh out and elaborate the randomly-generated prompts for what the Endless Sea presents, and establish challenges for the People to overcome.

As mentioned in the text above, inherent also in the design of the game has been the idea that the encounter that the People have on the Endless Sea are drawn at random from a deck of prompts.

There is a Twitter account that I dearly love called @str_voyage, a bot that generates an “endless nautical story” using random procedural generation.

The content it produces doesn’t always make sense, but more often than not is evocative and provokes the imagination. If a simple bot can produce coherent consistent story using procedural generation, I’ve always wondered, what could a table of creative and cooperating players do with a similarly-limited set of basic building blocks as their source material.

All that being said, then, here is the basic structure of the game:

1. There are playbooks for the People and for the Endless Sea. Each player runs one of each.
2. The structure of the game involves a series of encounters, prompts for which are drawn from a deck.
3. One player, controlling a suitable Threat, fleshes out the encounter.
4. One player, controlling a suitable Aspect, leads the People in confronting the encounter.

This is basically all there needs to be. 

I have an idea that there’ll be some special mechanics for the end-game, when the People arrive wherever they’ve been going, but the overwhelming majority of the game’s rules and play are going to rest on having these encounters.

What do these encounters look like, mechanics-wise? Here’s the current draft:

1. Time passes, triggering an encounter
2. An encounter card is drawn
3. The group determines which Threat the encounter belongs to
1. The Threat player should get to answer some questions (define some things) and ask some leading questions (force others to define some things)
4. The group determines which Aspect player will meet the encounter
1. The meeting of it should be a group effort; the lead Aspect player directs the confrontation, but choices/moves of the others may be involved
5. Mechanics happen – roll dice? draw runes? look at Blades & Sundered Land for inspiration –that resolve how well/badly things go. 
1. Possibly modified by whether the Aspect was a good choice to meet the Threat in question?
6. Consequences occur as a result of the encounter; something is lost, something is gained, something is learned
1. Are these the choices made by other players? Maybe?

Recently I’ve been watching Adam Koebel play Vincent Baker’s forum game A Sundered Land on his Twitch channel (slightly adapted), and a lot of the way this resolution mechanic is shaping up is inspired by that.

I’m loving the way A Sundered Land uses leading questions as a central mechanic: it’s entirely functional, it emphasizes those old AW ideas of “make the world seem real” and “always say what honesty demands”, and it leads towards fiction that is both compelling and non-generic/unique.

Interestingly, it’s the dice mechanic for combat in A Sundered Land that I find least interesting.

The most evocative confrontations in the several games Adam played were when he and Twitch-chat went slightly off-script and forgot about the combat dice.

So maybe the resolution mechanic for Across the Endless Sea should involve no dice or randomization at all.

Hm. A thought to return to in a future post, I think.

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.