"Welcome to my new fantasy game! You do not get to know the rules."

 You've heard of Eisen's Vow, yeah? 

No?

Okay, that's not unusual. It's only been called that for a while, although it's an idea as old as D&D itself. Over in his book The Elusive Shift (and on his blog, Playing at the World), Jon Peterson defines Eisen's Vow as --

the position that player enjoyment of the game is diminished by understanding how the referee resolves system events.

There's history behind this idea; in the interest of not re-hashing the wheel, you can also go listen to this here episode of the Roleplay Rescue podcast, where host Che Webster discusses it in detail and has a neat accent. 

But anyway. The basic notion is that if the players don't know the rules, and you -the GM- handle all of that on your end, then the players are interacting with the world and not the game mechanics. This, as I mentioned previously, hopes to front-load immersion. 

When I first read about it in the book, and again when I listened to Che's podcast episode, I was all, like, "Yyyyyyyeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh I dunno." Players -of which I am sometimes one- like knowing the rules to a certain point, so they know what risks they can and can't take. That's fair; that's just being smart.

But.

You can argue that players can still learn what risks they can and can't take even if they don't know the rules, and they learn those limitations the same way they learn anything in life: 

Through experience.

Plus, I'd rather my players poke around at the world because they can, not because they are told they can. I'd rather the risks and rewards in, say, fighting a handful of kobolds be present and evident by the information that I can give them, and that their characters grow in ability through lived, rather than tallied, experience. 

And that's what Rovainne wants to be: a play experience. It wants to come alive at the table, to be a thing that the players sink into and enjoy.

And! Plus! Also! There's another advantage to this play style: in the absence of to-hit modifiers, armor classes, target numbers, feats, skill levels and such, creativity and description become paramount. Can your party defeat these kobolds? Maybe. Probably. How? What are your tactics? No no no, not "what are you going to do to get +2 to hit them", I said what are you going to do? Do you just wade in? Do some of you flank them out? Are you dumber than a kobold? What about the one with the spear? 

The argument can be made that you can have a game that focuses on those same tactical considerations even if you have modifiers codified for every abstraction, and you know what? You can.

But you don't gotta. You can have a rich play experience that hinges on not having tactical modifiers and instead pretending that you're a knight and a scoundrel and a wizard's apprentice and a witch who have to get across this clearing in the woods, and there are some lizard-dog-things that say "No way", so what do you do about it?

Obviously, this requires a lot of trust between the players and the GM. That's why I intend to play this  with an established group who I trust will trust me. 

So the rules I'm using will be invisible to the players. But what rules am I using? 

...that would be telling. But I'll tell you what they're not, and I can tell you that they're not those rules because I considered all of the below but ultimately decided that they didn't fit what Rovainne wants to be:

• AD&D 2nd Edition or Rules Cyclopedia - despite being my favorite iterations of Brand Name D&D, as I've already stated, Rovainne doesn't want to be D&D.
• Castles & Crusades, 13th Age, Labyrinth Lord, OD&D and its clones - despite being other great ways to play D&D, well...they're...still D&D. With all the D&D expectations that I'd just end up chucking out anyway.
• GURPS, D6 Fantasy, HERO FREd, Savage Worlds - despite being some generic systems that I liked, Rovainne resisted being those games because they just wouldn't easily bend to what Rovainne wants to be. They could, eventually, but...it seemed like a lot of work, and the temptation was there to go down pathways that could lead away from the pure experience of what the setting wants to be, and risks me turning it into something else just because it seems like a good idea at the time.
• Dungeon World - too much to cut out, again. Though I did consider a basic PbtA 6-/7-9/10+ target spread and interpretation, but I had the feeling that it wouldn't give me the right feel that I wanted. I co-opted some of the ideas, though...
• Fate Core/Condensed/Accelerated - despite being one of my favorite ways to tell stories and such, some of my players balked at the odds of rolling 4dF, and I just really don't want to argue about that. 
• Cortex Prime - yeah, no, I ain't doin' that much work. Screw that. Nice game, but noooooo.

So the rules are none of those, and they're not a lot of other systems, either. They'll be my secret. Don't ask. 

Now...you've probably noticed that I keep talking about "what Rovainne wants to be". That's a whole topic unto itself, and I'm looking forward to discussing it with you and telling you what it means and how it intersects with my jacked-up creative process, which is one of the original themes of this blog...

...but not right now. You've already had enough to read. Come back later. 

FKR WTF FYI OK: Rovainne Edition

Yeah, okay, so. Yesterday I mentioned my new game setting. Today I'm gonna tell you about it. It's becoming kind of an important thing for me, for reasons that I-

What's that? You don't care? Okay! That's fine. This post will just be about what, not why. Later I'll talk about why.

Anyway...

I'm Back, FKRs!

 ...ha ha ha ha, that is a joke. I will explain it, in case it's not funny.

But first...

...yeah, it's been a long time since I updated this damned thing. You wanna know why? It's because I really haven't had much to say about gaming that I hadn't already said, or that I wasn't saying on Reddit, or that merited a full blog post and stuff. Oh, sure, I coulda written blog posts about other stuff -- but you don't wanna know any of that stuff, because frankly it's mostly personal drama stuff and not gaming stuff. 

You dig? Yeah, you dig. 

Having thus dug, I'll get back to why I'm all of a sudden posting again. As you may have surmised, it is because I now have stuff to say about gaming again. You clever, clever person, you.

So long story short, in this new year of 2023, I'm fixin' to get ready to run me one of them fancy FKR games that the kids are talking about.

What's that? You don't know what I'm talking about? And you wonder if I do, to start with? Well...okay, let's go slow. HIT THE, THE, JUMP THE BREAK, DO THE, UM, CLICK!

PROJECT: MURLYND

I had an idea today. It came in part from reading an old Dragon, in part from looking at Tunnels & Trolls 7th Edition and in part from the weather (warm, breezy weather acts like a creative battery for me; science has not yet determined the process by which this occurs). I've got a lot to say about it, but I'll cut to the chase.

PROJECT: MURLYND (its working title) is a 30-day attempt at creating a FRPG campaign setting. The idea is to sketch out a campaign setting in broad strokes, and to add some bit of work (whatever it is) every day for a month. Therefore, it's as much about creativity as it is about dedication.

I'm easily distractible and lazy, so the idea of giving myself a 30-day project like this is scary and exciting at the same time. I want to get myself used to, you know, working on something consistently, so PROJECT: MURLYND is a way to do that.

Some of you old school guys and gals out there might remember Dragon #71, which featured an article entitled "Greyhawk's World" by Gary Gygax himself. The article detailed a quartet of "quasi-deities" from the author's campaign, and one of them was this guy:


Yup. That's Clint Eastwood all right. Well, it's Murlynd, and he was into the American Old West, despite being an AD&D character. He had a pair of pistols and a horse and a dancing broadsword.

In an AD&D game.

Obviously, his player, and Gygax, liked this crazy notion enough to not only allow it in the game but to publish it in Dragon as Greyhawk material. In other words, they thought it was cool so they went with it.

That my friends, is where I'm taking my major inspiration: if it's cool, put it in the campaign setting. To hell with over-thinking; nuts to fiddly-bits. Just come up with a wide framework, like girders in a building. Fill in the details later.

And add something every day, for 30 days.

It will start off with the really broad stuff -- how many kingdoms or areas, their names and general (very general) flavors, gods worshipped, and so on. Then it'll move on to some somewhat more specific things like a few notes on this Mongolian-esque nomad tribe or that hidden city. It'll end with a map, which won't even be all that detailed, because when I try to do it the other way I get frustrated for some reason.

Taking a page from Peter Spahn's Chronicles of Amherth, it'll include a series of drag-and-drop ideas not associated with any location or culture -- kind of a grab-bag of adventure fodder.

The project has a few rules:

1. Keep it broad!
Every entry just needs enough info in it to inspire detal later on, NOT to dictate it. Population distribution and stuff like that is cool, but it's cooler to know that the South Plains are inhabited by megalithic monsters and prehistoric mammals the size of SUVs.

2. Add something every day!
This is about focus more than anything. It's about actually doing it and having something to show at the end.

3. Use of found elements is allowed!
In other words: license to steal. As long as I put my own spin on it, or use it to shape something else, or at least think it's cool...then it's cool. Got a copy of Keep on the Borderlands? Put that mofo in there. Cool picture on Jeff Rients' blog? Snatch. Want Abe Vigoda and Pat Benatar to be deities? Yea, baby, you're making gravy without the lumps!

4. Don't get obsessed!
Seriously. It's just a gameworld. C'mon, it's got Pat Benatar in it!

Well...let's see how this works.

I Am An Idiot, And Forgot A Couple.

Ah, yes. My absolute favorite game-city of all freaking time.

It's danged near perfect for a tabletop campaign. Already stocked with NPCs, adventure ideas, locations, an interactive map and tons of mood and feel. Plus, players are likely to be familiar with the setting, and additional info is readily available.

C'mon. Tommy Vercetti can't keep the town forever.

Of course, I also have a copy of Vice Squad: Miami Nights, which not only wraps up feel and flavor into a delicious package, it has one of my favorite elements in a setting book. There's a section called "Never A Dull Moment", which is nothing more or less than an array of little flavor-setting incidents to spring on your players. Everything from getting your car tagged to chance run-ins with important NPCs, every one of them adds flavor and life to the setting.

Aces.

You know, I do prefer warmer climes...

Ludometrophilia

I didn't take Latin in high school but I think the above means "Love of game-cities". If not, I welcome correction.

Yesterday we went to Greenwood and hit up the Half-Price Books. I passed on the $20.00 copy of Ex Machina and went for something a little older:

R. Talsorian's Night City sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. Although it's good stuff for sure, CP 2020 isn't really my best choice for cyberpunk gaming. However, I couldn't pass up this little nugget of joy for five bucks and change, especially since it still had the color poster-map. Snag!

I've only skimmed it so far, but I find it pleasant and probably really useful (what I will henceforth term "The Thomas Factor"). It details hundreds of locations in Night City, gives an overview of how the city works, groups locations by type on a recurring map and gives a random encounter chart and interesting NPCs for each section of the city. Neat! The tone is chatty and informal, and it has a lot of flavor without being drenched in it.

Looking at it on the drive home got me to thinking about the other city-themed gamebooks that I own, and especially about how much I like that sort of thing: visitor's guides to places that don't exist.

The Edge is another one of those favorites. Much of Over The Edge, Jonathan Tweet's charmingly surreal 1992 game, is given over to describing the city and its people. It's a bizarre, cosmopolitan town on a semi-secret mediterranean island called Al Amarja, and it has everything from ex-CIA guys and mad scientists to mutants, aliens and zombies. It paints a colorful picture of a weird and multi-cultural society, and it does it by breaking the city down into manageable chunks. This book, too, gives random encounter charts for each "barrio" or neighborhood, although OTE's charts are more clever than Night City's. Reading it truly gives the sense of a balmy, weird metropolis on an island somewere. Strangely, I have never run this game.


San Angelo: City of Heroes, by the way, ROCKED. Do you like comics? Here, I'll let this guy say it for me:

"I keep getting requests for an Astro City RPG; we're not planning to do one - but I think any Astro City fans who want such a game should at least try out San Angelo. It's an intricate, involving, well-realized gaming world, and the emphasis on the reality of the surroundings and the humanity of the characters may make it just what they're looking for."

-- Kurt Busiek, creator of Astro City

Busiek nailed it -- this city feels real. It feels alive. It has a history, it has a future. You can really, truly tell that people live there, and furthermore, that your PCs can show up and make a difference. It needs a bigger map, but it's still aces.

I.C.E.'s Cyberspace was my cyberpunk game of choice Back In The Day, and while the default setting was ostensibly San Francisco, this little gem was published as an alternate stomping ground. It focuses not on Chicago itself but on the New Edison corp.'s Chicago Arcology, a self-contained city-within-a-city built around a shopping mall. It has its own gangs, its own neightborhoods (kind of), its own mass transit, its own secrets. Night City has one of these, too, but Chicago Arcology is all about its own microcosm.

Plus, it every few pages or so, the book gives you little news-fax headlines to peruse -- they range from the factual and serious to the satirical and ridiculous, capturing that "MediaBreak" feel that RoboCop made so tasty.

White Wolf's The Chaos Factor supplement for Mage: The Ascension attempted to detail Mexico City as a game setting and bored me.

Were I enterprising, I'd write one of these of my own -- maybe a city guide to Ranseur City, chief metropolis of my Traveller subsector's capital, with its corporate starship construction offices and media production facilities and robot-controlled air/raft taxis and its extensive computer networks and neat antigrav restaurants.

But I'm not an enterprising sort.

Plus, who besides me would use it?

Shelzar it is!

The city has been chosen. Furthermore, when we couldn't decide between D6 and Stories System, we rolled a die.

D6 it is. Excellent! I loves me that system, by gum.

What's it gonna be about? *shrug* Hell if I know. I know her character is gonna be runaway nobility who joined the Thieves' Guild (or its local equivalent), and after reading this page right here, I got an idea involving a popular pit-fighter, the potion he secretly imbibes before going into a bout, and a plan to get him to throw a fight without him knowing about it. Heh heh heh.

Come to think, I might not read too much out of the Shelzar book, just in case -- to give myself some wiggle room. In other words, use the book more as inspiration than a kind of weird-ass gospel.

Welp! It's a start.

Shelzar Shadizar Lankhmar Waterdeep

Listen --

I.

Love.

Cities.

Somethin' about 'em, I dunno what. The people, the bustle, the energy, the architecture. I really dig it. Faithful readers of this blog most lofty will recall, with a warm glow in their eager bellies, that I have spoken before of Mexico City and how much the place moves me. Aye, thou hast!

Er. Hath! Umn. Which-...whichever. Anyway, I like cities, and I have a thing about the ones that don't really exist.

In fact, about 8-10 years ago, I had a series of dreams about a city in particular, unnamed and out of space and time, modern and beautiful and alive with its own character despite being no more than a night's subconscious fancy. Almost like a a dream-city out of a Lovecraft story, but, you know, not malevolent and madness-inducing. Like, no doom, or seaweed.

I also like running micro-campaigns for my wife. She's partway through a ten-day work week and she deserves a little somethin' to blow off steam as soon as that jag is over. Ergo, I'm thinking about running such a game for her pretty soon, and sticking it squarely in an urban setting. I'm opting for fantasy as my genre of choice, if for no other reason than that I feel like it, so there.

Although I've created (or, at least, started to create) several FRPG cities in the past, I'm in no mood to futz and fumble with that particular honey-trap; my fingers will get sticky with layout and street names and concepts ad guilds and so on and so forth and nothing will get done. Screw that. I'm shoppin' off the rack.

Four ready-made fantasy cities come to mind. All four are well-established in one form or another, with lots of info available for the harried (or lazy) GM.

I just gotta pick one.

This...won't be easy.

SHELZAR: City Of Sins

From White Wolf's "Scarred Lands" line. Definitely influenced by Howard's Shadizar, full of naughtiness and peril. Right on.

Pros: I have the book; Amber's been wanting to do someting in the Scarred Lands; if I decide to use Microlite20, the stats are all ready to go.

Cons: I dunno that I'd actually use some of the stuff, like the sex constructs and the gibbering mouther employed for...uh...naughtiness.


SHADIZAR - City Of Wickedness

The original, from Robert E. Howard's typewriter! Lusty, pulpy goodness -- a language I speak well enough.

Pros: Hyboria!; kind of open to interpretation, as I don't have too much reference material; nice map from Mongoose Publishing.

Cons: I don't have the boxed set, so I'd have to make up a lot of the stuff myself (not so bad, but again, the goal is to use existing stuff, not go hanging myself up in the throes of creation).


LANKHMAR - City Of Adventure

More pulp from the mind of Fritz Leiber. Nexus of craziness!

Pros: Lots of info available; Thieves' Guild a plus; some old TSR adventures in the closet; underground city of sentient rats!

Cons: I don't have a map; I don't have a main reference book; I don't have a lot of time to re-read a buncha Leiber, as much as I'd like to.



WATERDEEP - City Of Elminst- uh, Splendors

The Forgotten Realms: Everything, The Kitchen Sink, Ten Brands Of Dish Soap and Another Sink Just In Case.

Pros: We have the old, big-ass AD&D 2nd Ed. boxed set, complete with big-ass map and big-ass info; Realms allows for transition to other types of themes and adventures if we feel like it; Amber likes her some Faerun.

Cons: Big-ass boxed set to read.


Good options all, and you can see why it's tricky. But my quest ends not there: two other things must be decided.

One is what system to use. I'm thinking easy, so it's either gonna be M20, D6 or Stories System. Low-prep is the key, but I still hafta decide.

The other...does she even want to play?

Hey! Look! A phone!

I Been Witched!

Okay. You know that Encounter Critical didn't come out in1979. I know know that Encounter Critical didn't come out in1979. Everybody knows that Encounter Critical didn't come out in1979.

I manage, however, not to truly believe it.

In other words, the notion of Encounter Critical being written, and played, in 1979 is so very real to me, that the truth is...I dunno...less interesting? Less believable?

It's witchcraft! I been magicked!

He's A Special Little Snowflake, That Mike, He Is.

"I've been cyberstalking you on your blog and you haven't updated in a while," said Mike, a dude with whom I work. "What's up with that?"

Okay, Mike, here's a post just for you. It's about paper gaming miniatures, though, so you'd better like paper gaming miniatures.

Check it. T. Jordan "Greywolf" Peacock created a bunch of True-Type fonts which allow you to print out paper minis by the ton. Fantasy, SF, anthropomorphic animals, even starships. Yowza! They're freebies, and I say go download 'em.

Oh. They're not colored, but any goofball with a paint program and three brain cells to rub together can produce extra-awesome colory minis like the ones you see here. Then print 'em out on cardstock, fold 'em up, and avast!

Greywolf isn't the only guy what makes with the paper minis. Everyone here knows about S. John Ross' Sparks, except maybe Mike, but now that I've linked to it he really has no excuse.

Miniature Wargaming has some stuff, too -- historicals, western, vehicles even. And the Warrenton Area Game Club's paper minis will keep you busy for hours with figs like these:


I better see some 2D Space Marines on your desk, Mike. Else I won't think you're stalking me right.