Downtime

Many table-top roleplaying games suffer from the ‘murder-hobo’ syndrome, where all the characters do in the game is kill things and take their stuff. Their personalities can become one-note because of this, and so less interesting to play. One way around this problem is for the character’s to pursue some downtime activities. Here I discuss what downtime is, and how you can make some downtime activities that are more interesting and more useful for your game.

What is downtime?

The game of D&D (or any other table-top roleplaying game) normally concerns itself with simple actions, which play out relatively quickly. A fight, a conversation, a meal, a short rest or even a long rest, and then you go onto the next thing. So most activities are things that happen “on screen”, but in the case of uneventful rests the DM will “skip to the end”.

Downtime is different. Downtime is the period away from the adventure, when the characters are not in mortal peril, and are free to pursue side-projects. Your character is not always adventuring, but may have a home-base such as stronghold or wizard’s tower, or even just a friendly local bar where everybody knows their name. This period of non-adventuring may not be inactive though, and can involve activities that benefit them when they are back in the dungeon.

What are some downtime activities?

The D&D players handbook and dungeons masters guide lists some downtime activities. They include

• Crafting – making magical and non-magical items
• Practising a profession – to earn money, to keep up your responsibilities, or simply to help people
• Recuperating – to recover from the effects of injury, disease or poison
• Researching – to find new places to explore, to learn more about a mystery
• Training – to learn a new language or proficiency with a set of tools
• Building a stronghold – to have somewhere to call your home
• Carousing – to have a good time, and reduce the stress of facing near death constantly
• Performing sacred rite – to maintain your connection to your deity or patron
• Running a business – to earn money etc
• Sowing rumours – to influence public opinion about a person or organisation

But this is not an exhaustive list, of course. Any thing the players want to do when not engaged in adventuring can be considered a downtime activity. Even travelling might be considered a downtime activity, if it was through relatively safe territory and did not involve any major narrative progression.

These activities do not need to be role-played in detail, and can be discussed and resolved quickly (perhaps through a montage).

How to make them more interesting and useful

Generally downtime actions can be a bit bland. They can add some colour to a character, but may not add that much, or do much to progress the story.

Of course, that doesn’t have to be the case. Firstly, the downtime activities can be directly related to the story. Perhaps the characters realise that they are hopefully outclassed by the big bad, and need to train more and craft powerful magic items to help defeat them.

Secondly, these ‘side-quests’ may not be completely bland and uncontested. There might be some complications. This Unearthed Arcana article suggests the idea of ‘foils’, enemies that work against the players during their downtime activities, creating ‘complications’. These complications can make for fun story beats, even though they’re not resolved in the classic D&D style.

Examples from fiction

What are some example of downtime activities in fiction that you can use to inspire your game’s downtime?

• Beach Episodes. In fact a good example of recuperation downtime would be ‘The Tales of Ba Sing Se’ from Avatar: the Last Airbender.
• The training montage, of which ‘Rocky‘ has become the archetypical example, but ‘The Matrix’ has a classic training montage (“I know Kung-Fu”) that also advances the story.
• The ‘Let it Go’ song from Frozen is a ‘Building a Stronghold’ montage. Elsa does it instantly with magical powers, but it’s still a downtime activity.
• There is a great scene in Frost/Nixon where the characters engage in in-depth research activity, to make David Frost ready for the final interview.

How to get more out of them

Here are some suggestions for making downtime more integral for the game, and fun for the players.

• Build the downtime activities in from character creation. It’s important to know what the character is doing when they’re not adventuring, and it can lead to a more developed character, with opportunities for growth. For example, maybe the handling thief is also a waiter in their aunt’s struggling restaurant. Later on the campaign, the character’s need to get money together to buy the restaurant from the evil landlord.
• Make them memorable. Foils can make a downtime activity more story-like, as the activity becomes more difficult and challenging. But even smaller additions, such as memorable characters (the absent-minded librarian, the warm and amiable fencing instructor) or scenery can make a character enthusiastic about the story elements of downtime.
• Make them important to the characters. A long-term campaign with a end-goal may require long-term projects or activities such as crafting, researching or gaining popularity and support, and these cannot simply be achieved by killing things. Or if the characters are motivated to (for example) establish a new temple or expand the variety of bees in their apiary, the players will then see these things as just as important as the adventures they go on.

Narrative Mechanisms: Stunts and Momentum

As a follow-up to my discussion of Narrative Mechanisms in TTRPGs, I want to consider two specific roleplaying games: Exalted (and its spin off, Exalted Essence), and Ironsworn.

Exalted takes place in a high fantasy world, and is played on an epic scale. The heroes are meant to be larger than life, and are inspired by things like real-world mythology, as well as Japanese anime and Chinese wuxia series.

In contrast Ironsworn is very much played on a different scale. It is inspired by dark fantasy European stories, and while the quests may be perilous, the stakes are often smaller.

However, both games have narrative mechanisms, which help the story along, but do not simulate the world. (This aspect of new TTRPGs is the difference between simulations vs story-gaming, which I outlined before). These are ‘stunts’ in Exalted, and ‘momentum’ in Ironsworn.

1. Stunts

Old style D&D, and also the World of Darkness games that Exalted takes its original rule set from, are basically pure simulations games. No rule ‘breaks’ the immersion in the game, and everything is set up to be consistent with the world of that game. Even magic is still a consistent set of rules.

With Exalted though, this starts to change. Exalted has stunts, whereby a character can perform a stunt to make the action more ‘cool’, and gains a benefit for doing so.

Imagine in a game of D&D, if a player said they want to swing on a chandelier across the room, avoiding enemy archers, do a double-forward flip through the air and land by kicking their opponent down, followed by a rapier stab to the chest. This would be dramatic and cinematic, but difficult. There would be multiple rolls required (acrobatics, enemy attack rolls, and your own attack roll), and it would be more difficult to pull off successfully than a simple attack.

In Exalted, such an action would be considered a stunt, would require only a single roll, and would gain you extra dice to roll, making a positive outcome more likely. This is because it would ‘look’ great (in the theatre of the mind), and so tell a more exciting story. Exalted specifically says in the rules that such dramatic and cinematic stunts should have an increased chance of success. So they go beyond a simple medieval combat simulator, to give something that enhances the narrative flow.

Exalted Essence changes this up even further. When you do a stunt, you can use the extra dice immediately for your own roll. Or, you can bank these for other benefits: helping other players, restoring resources such as essence or willpower, dramatic editing, or instant training. Dramatic Editing is where you change the scene to your benefit. For example, a dramatic escape might end with you “Landing in the Saddle“, even though there was no horse established to be there beforehand. Effectively stunts are a mechanism for players to change reality to some extent, or at least change the reality as defined by the GM.

This has some small justification in the fiction of the universe. The Exalted are people that have been gifted some power of the gods, and so they are naturally favoured by the ‘source code’ of Creation. (This is especially true for the Sidereal Exalted). But it means that if you’re looking for a game with a rigid set of rules for things like combat etc, and even how the world works, Exalted (the game) might not be the choice of game for you.

But, if you are keen to play a more John Wick, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or DBZ-like game, Exalted shines.

2. Momentum

Ironsworn is very different. The Ironsworn rules are somewhat based on PbtA, so instead of taking actions, your players make moves. (The difference between actions and moves is more philosophical than anything else, so I’m going to gloss over it). There is no stunting built in, because it’s not built for creating that kind of over-the-top story.

But, it does have the momentum mechanism. To quote, momentum represents how your characters are faring in their quests. If the quest is going well, the momentum will be positive, but if things are starting to go wrong, it may go negative. Interestingly, the players can burn positive momentum, to remove a complication, turn a miss into a weak hit, or a strong hit into a decisive blow. This allows the players to move sail through situations that may otherwise have stalled them.

But, if the momentum is negative, it will make life more difficult for you, cancelling your action die if it rolls badly. When your momentum reaches the threshold of -6, the players face a setback, which might “reduce your health, spirit, or supply”, “or undermine your progress in a current quest, journey, or fight“. So negative momentum should be avoided, except so far as to make the story more interesting (tales of adversity are often more gripping).

3. Success vs failure

In D&D a success or a failure will have consequences for the characters. This result will have a knock-on effect for the story. But narrative mechanisms allow players and GMs to control the narrative more directly.

Exalted is a game about the consequences of success. And so the rules are there to help the players succeed, but in the most dramatic and narratively-interesting way possible. Stunts, therefore, heighten the drama, giving that cinematic feel to the game.

Ironsworn is a game about the consequences of failure. Momentum allows players to ‘kick the can’ of failure down the road, but it may still come back to hurt them later (as burning momentum early in the story may have bad repercussions). And when things start to go downhill, they can go downhill really fast. Of course, if the players manage to regroup, and pull success from the jaws of defeat at the last minute, the story can be equally satisfying.

Exalted: Why Play An Abyssal?

The tabletop roleplaying game ‘Exalted’ is set in an epic high fantasy world, based on non-Western fantasy and mythological sources. It is less ‘The Lord of the Rings’, and more ‘The Iliad’, ‘The Mahabharata’ or ‘Journey to the West’. In the base game, the players are expected to take on the roles of the Solar Exalted, Chosen of the Unconquered Sun, and the rightful rulers of creation (formerly deposed and hunted, but now returning in larger numbers).

But, this being a White Wolf game, there are plenty of other character options (splats), including Lunar Exalted (werwolf/shapeshifters), Dragon-Blooded Exalted (elemental-focused foot-soldiers) and the Sidereal Exalted (mysterious astrologers and wizards). These are all types of ‘good guys’, or at least relatively good, given the morally ambiguous nature of the setting.

So what are the Abyssal Exalted? They are the undead servants of the Deathlords. Corrupted versions of the Solar Exalted, they appeared recently in Creation, and serve their masters to usher/drag the whole world in to the Underworld, and through the gaping maw of oblivion. They basically want everybody dead. So, in a sense, they are much more obviously the ‘bad guys’.

And yet these are a character option for players.

Here I discuss why you might choose to play Exalted as a deathknight, what motivations such characters might have, and some suggestions from fiction of similar characters.

1. Why play as an Abyssal?

We play roleplaying games because creating a good story with your friends is fun. But, for this to be true, it has to be a story that you enjoy. Complex stories about morally ambiguous characters are often good. But simple stories about sociopaths killing a lot of people are generally not fun (unless you are, yourself, a sadist). So, to play an Abyssal and for it to be fun for everyone, it has to be a nuanced character who is not just a simple villain.

There are two obvious options here, then: redemption, or antihero.

The redemption arc is where the villain, who previously opposed the hero, sees the error of their previous course of actions, and decides on a new direction to redeem themselves. Darth Vader, Zuko, Loki, Spike, Draco Malfoy, Michael (from the Good Place), all of these characters stood against the hero, and then changed their allegiance to join the hero. An Abyssal would start opposing the Solar Exalted, and loyal to their Deathlord. But at some point, they broke away, and are trying to use their powers to help. If playing a redemptive character appeals to you, then the Abyssal Exalted would be a great option.

The antihero is someone who has villainous qualities, or at least lacks conventional heroic attributes, but ends up acting in a heroic manner. Riddick, Spawn, Crowley (from Supernatural), Arya Stark, Wolverine, the Punisher, Crowley (from Good Omens), Dexter Morgan, Harley Quinn (and all of the Suicide Squad), Arthur Morgan, all of these characters are pretty screwed up, killing not as a last resort to help people, but often simply to satisfy their bloodlust. They don’t want to redeemed, as they see their actions as justified. Yet, they end up defeating some greater evil, and becoming the ‘hero’.

(In fact, most if not all of the characters in Exalted are either antiheroes already, or become so later on).

So, if playing an antihero (with some kick-ass necromantic abilities) appeals to you, again Abyssal is a good choice.

2. Heroes of their own stories

All of the best villains are the heroes of their own stories. They have recognisable motivations, that explain (or justify to themselves) their actions. This allows us to emphasise with them, even if we despise what they do.

So, what are some of the motivations for Abyssals:

• The nihilist/anti-natalist: the world sucks and is full of pain, so killing people is a mercy
• Revenge: you were wronged in some way, and this an opportunity to have your vengeance
• Being alive again: Abyssals are recruited from dead people, and being dead is pretty awful. Even if you don’t agree with the plans of the Deathlords, the opportunity to be alive again is one that is hard to turn down.
• Fighting other Deathlords (aka the enemy of my enemy is my friend): The Deathlord’s main enemies are each other. Abyssals may be recruited to fight/scheme against other Deathlords.

3. Inspiration

What are some figures from fiction that can be used to inspire your Abyssal characters? Here is a list of four I have chosen specifically because they are very ‘Abyssal’, in that they have a patron or lord, who may also be responsible for their abilities, they have necromantic or Abyssal-like abilities, and they believe what they’re doing is right.

• Corvo Attano, from Dishonored: framed from a crime they didn’t commit, falsely imprisonned and tortured to confess, given supernatural abilities by a mysterious otherworldly figure, Corvo is very on-brand from the Abyssals.
• Szeth-son-son-Vallano from the Words of Radiance books: Szeth is an assassin who believes himself to be dammed (Truthless) and compelled to obey who ever holds the Oathstone. Since he is already in his own personal hell, nothing he does is his responsibility.
• Zagreus, from Hades: as described by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, Zagreus is attempting the ‘reverse Orpheus’, to break out of hell. Zagreus is rebelling against his Deathlord (Hades, his father), but he lives in the Underworld, and cares about the dead souls there, which is also an Abyssal thing.
• Hector and Isaac from the Castlevania animated series: these guys would be called ’necrotechs’ in Exalted. They create the horrific monsters that Dracula (their Deathlord) sends against the living world. This show also nicely shows the rivalry between different vampires, which happens in Exalted between the different Deathlords.

4. Be considerate

However, all of this comes with a warning. Just because you’re playing a monster in the game, doesn’t mean that you have to be one in real life. Be considerate of the other players. Establish some lines and veils. Some players may be ok with depictions of violence, but not sexual content. Or ok with some limited portrayal of sexual content, but not at all with sexual violence. Be aware of where the lines and veils are, don’t cross them. The X-card can be your friend.

Postscript: there is an Exalted podcast (Systematic Understanding of Everything) that has an episode discussing the Abyssal Exalted, and this also gives a very nice overview.

Character classes in D&D and Avatar Legends: the RPG

What is a character class?

Dungeons and Dragons started as a medieval fantasy combat simulator. The inventors had played a lot of medieval war-games, and wanted a new type of game where the players controlled a single unit, or ‘character.’ This is was obviously an attempt to model something like ‘The Lord of the Rings’ where we follow the members of the fellowship through their individual stories, and the big battles are merely backdrop.

So, in keeping with D&D in its roots as a medieval combat simulator, the character classes are just unit descriptors. In a war-game you may pick up a unit and ask ‘what is this?’ and be told ‘cavalry officer’ or ‘infantryman’ or ‘guy that puts big rocks in the trebuchet’. In the same way, in D&D you may pick up a mini representing a character to learn that it’s a fighter or a cleric or a wizard.

These classes exist so that you understand what special abilities each unit/character has. But they are very reductive. Why can’t I be a fighter who can sing really well? Or a wizard who also uses a sword? Many games that came after D&D did away with classes all together, allowing you to choose your skills and abilities in a more bespoke fashion.

What is a good fit for Avatar?

Imagine you’re an upcoming TTRPG designer, from the 1980s, and you’ve landed the job at Magpie games, writing the licensed RPG for one of the most popular TV series in the world: “Avatar: the Last Airbender.” Day one, and you walk into the office of the ViacomCBS head of brand management for the game. They ask you: “What’s your idea for character classes?”

“Well, I guess… air-bender, earth-bender, fire-bender and water-bender. Oh, and non-bender.”

Your boss looks at you for a long thirty seconds, to check if you’re joking.

“The door is over there. Please see yourself out.”

The idea of creating character classes on bending abilities (or the lack of) is an inherently bad idea, for two reasons.

1) No one will ever pick non-bender, and the game will be unbalanced. The ability to manipulate one of the four fundamental elements of that world will never be balanced in the rules with someone who cannot.

2) It goes against the ethos of the story. We don’t love the characters of those shows because they have kick-ass special abilities. We love them as people, because they have evocative stories.

As a side note: Avatar has been called the true successor of Star Wars for the current generation. This is because it, like Star Wars, achieves two things that are very difficult to do at the same time: incredible world building and evocative narratives. Everyone knows the story of the first Star Wars movie, because it’s so easy to follow (it’s the heroes journey), but also because we like those characters. We feel Luke’s yearning for adventure, but uncertainty in himself. We fear the tyrannical Darth Vader, and admire the self-confidence of Han Solo. The same is true for Avatar. We feel Aang’s uncertainty and desire to runaway from his problems. We understand Zuko’s desire for acceptance from his family. And we admire Katara’s compassion and faith in the Avatar in the face of overwhelming odds.

So, how do we create character classes for Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game? We look at the roles of the character in the narrative.

Playbooks

I have written about the narrativist vs simulationist split in TTRPGs before. The designers for Avatar Legends decided to fall more on the narrativist side, and use Powered by the Apocalypse as the base. Apocalypse World, one of the first PbtA games, didn’t have character classes. Instead it had playbooks. Playbooks don’t just function as descriptions of your special abilities, they also function as descriptions of your role in the narrative.

Consider the Root RPG, also written by Magpie Games (which I did back when it was running on Kickstarter). In early released material, the Playbooks are

• The Champion
• The Chronicler
• The Exile
• The Envoy
• The Heretic
• The Pirate
• The Prince
• The Racounter
• The Raider
• The Seeker

These are very different from the standard D&D classes. By choosing a playbook, you are not just choosing special abilities and combat skills, you are choosing your drives, your connections, and maybe even things like your fashion aesthetic.

Of course, this may sound restrictive. But as they say themselves “A playbook is a particular archetype, a set of ideas bound together as a guideline for your character—but not a straitjacket.” There is still room for you to define your own uniqueness inside a particular playbook.

Avatar Legends: Playbooks

What are the playbooks for Avatar Legends? The Kickstarter website lists them as:

• The Adamant
• The Bold
• The Guardian
• The Hammer
• The Icon
• The Idealist
• The Pillar
• The Prodigy
• The Rogue
• The Successor

This may not be the definitive list, as other playbooks may appear in the final game.

Looking at this list, we can instantly assign characters from the A:tLA show to specific playbooks. Sokka is obviously the Pillar, Toph is the Hammer, Aang is the Icon, and Katara is the Idealist. The playbook may not list what abilities they have in terms of bending or non-bending, but instead provide details that define their role in the narrative.

Conclusion

There is not much else to say. I think the PbtA system is a great choice for something so narratively focussed as Avatar. If you love the show, and these kind of ideas remotely interest you, consider backing the Kickstarter. Then again, maybe you already have!

Narrative mechanisms in table-top roleplaying games

It’s your world Frank, we just live in it.

Sammy Davis Jr

Table-top roleplaying games started originally as war-games. The players took on one role, a single player character. And the Dungeon Master played everyone else in the world, including (crucially) the inanimate objects. To misquote Sammy Davis Jr, in these early games, it was the DM’s world, and the PCs just lived there.

So what happened? Recently (since the mid-2000s) we started to see the introduction of what I will call ‘narrative mechanisms’ in table-top RPGs. These are rules in the game that allow the players to monitor, or even change the narrative. These are different from the original war-game-style RPG rules, which were only ‘dramatic mechanisms’. Let me explain the difference.

Imagine a classic D&D scenario. The players have to reach some objective (a captured princess, some treasure etc). Between their starting point and the objective are a number of obstacles (some orc guards, a locked door, and maybe a final boss such as a dragon). As the players reach each obstacle they need to resolve that dramatic conflict, which they can do in the usual manner (combat, spells etc) or an unusual manner (seduce the orcs, bypass the door entirely, and defeat the dragon in a philosophical debate).

The ‘dramatic mechanisms’ allow these conflicts to be resolved. But the rules only govern interactions between things in the world. When a PC stabs or flirts with an orc, tries to pick a lock or cast a spell, the rules govern what happens in these internal interactions. But the narrative is only changed by the outcome of these interactions. And if the players or the DM don’t like the direction the narrative is going, they need to change the choices made by the characters.

Narrative mechanisms work differently. They’re not about interaction between PC and object, or PC and NPC. Instead they’re about the flow of the story itself.

Some examples of these include:

• Progress clocks and planning/engagement in Blades in the Dark
• The churn in The Expanse
• Obligation in the Star Wars RPG
• Momentum in Ironsworn

The interesting thing here is that these are kind of ‘meta’ rules, since they are rules that govern the story rather than rules that govern the world. And they can be different, depending on the kind of narrative that you want. For example, in The Expanse, which is a game about ordinary people being caught in system- or galaxy-wide events beyond their control, the churn is a nice mechanism to represent when things are things are about to blow-up, and major events are about to happen.

Some of these narrative mechanisms are effectively inviting the players in to be co-DMs in shaping the story. Ironsworn, for example, is meant to be played entirely without a DM, just the players creating the story together as they go.

You could argue that the Shadow from Wraith: the Oblivion is a narrative mechanism. I would not, however, because the shadow is a real thing in the world of Wraith, that has dramatic consequences, and the mechanisms that govern the shadow are more dramatic that narrative, in my mind. So The Shadow is really an antagonistic player character, being portrayed by another player, than a non-player character.

This split between RPGs that have only dramatic mechanisms (such as D&D and the World of Darkness games), and those that have both dramatic and narrative mechanisms (such as those mentioned above), is close to (but not exactly the same as) the Story-gaming vs OSR split. To lift directly from here,

… [story-games] tend to have more rules that supported the integrity of the genre of game and the intended play experience whereas traditional RPGs tended to have more rules supporting the integrity of the fictional game world.

Zak Smith

Which side do I fall on? Well, you might expect that, given that I support innovation and narratively satisfying games, I would be in favour of narrative mechanisms. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I still prefer games where the characters interact directly with the world, and the story is shaped by what the characters chose to do, not what the players decide. In this way, I have a lot more sympathy for the OSR side of the argument.

Does this mean I want to be a dictator, and the players are just along for the ride (living in my world)? No. The story still changes based on the choices made by the characters. But I kind of like sandboxes, where the players can make whatever choice they like, based on what they feel their character should do.

But, maybe I haven’t given narrative enough of a try, or explored how they work to the necessary extent. So, I will do some research, and try to write more on this subject.

The Feral World – philosophy statement

I wanted to write a bit to describe the D&D game I have been running for the last couple of years.

(Is there anything more boring than someone talking about their D&D game, as though it’s going to be the next Critical Role? No, it’s always less interesting to hear about a game than play in it. But sorry, you’re stuck with it now)

I had the idea to do something that was “D&D in reverse”, with monsters coming from cave lairs to raid human settlements, and then return, carrying treasure and magical items.

But, I didn’t want to run an ‘evil campaign’. People just being horrible to each other for the sake of it gets dull very quickly, in my opinion.

So, there were the two philosophical starting points (axioms) for the game and setting:

1. Player Characters are drawn only from the monstrous races, in this case, the character races given in Volo’s Guide to Monsters.
2. The world is written in shades of grey, with good and evil to be found everywhere.

From this, I decided on a rough plot: the world suffered a huge, genocidal war between orcs and the ‘good races’ (humans, elves, dwarves, halfings etc). The end of war saw complete annihilation of both sides, and the remnant races (goblinoids, yuan-ti, tritons, etc) expanding to explore and colonise the now empty world.

This plot gave an interesting third axiom:

3. No one knows what is going on!

For example, no one knows what caused final and complete death of all participants in the war, but left other races relatively untouched. This gives us a reason for a bunch of members of different races to be working together. I created an organisation called ‘the Lab’, which has members of all races, all sharing information about the end of the Extinction War. All of the players are working, either directly or indirectly, for the Lab.

(In my head, the Lab is run by a literal lab, i.e. a super-intelligent black Labrador, who was a human wizard’s familiar, left behind when his master vanished at the end of the war. But the players have no curiosity about the Lab at all! Like, zero. I wish they were more curious! So even if there was a dog at the head of this organistion, there is almost no chance they would ever meet them.)

One problem with this setting is that nothing is necessarily traditional D&D anymore. Human civilisation has been destroyed, and the individual races are trying to build their own replacements, which don’t necessarily look anything like human society. But it also means traditional rewards (e.g. treasure) don’t necessarily have a lot of meaning. Suppose you find 100 gp. Where are you going to spend it, if all the taverns have been destroyed?

So this means that I need need to be more creative about locations. Which is fun! But also somewhat hard work.

The other problem is the ‘metaplot’. The players have been doing stuff (exploring empty cities, killing dragons, fermenting violent revolution) in the ‘Ashen Sea’ area of this world. Meanwhile, events go on in the background, without their involvement. For example, in one of the first few sessions, it became clear that a huge hobgoblin army was marching somewhere. Rumours have been heard, and advance scouts from the host have been encountered, but it was not clear initially where the army was going. Now they know that the army is heading for the city that they are in right now.

But this is not the only plot element happening in the background! In fact, I worry somewhat that I have ‘over-flavoured’ this setting. With so many different herbs and spices available, maybe it all tastes like nothing. This is reflected by the fact that it feels very picaresque (‘a series of loosely connected adventures or episodes’) to me, with the characters jumping from location to location with only loose connection between them. For a satisfying story, many of these elements need to be resolved, and be tied more closely to the individual character’s stories.

So finally, we have the mystery! Why is the world screwed up? How did the extinction war finally end? I know, or at least I have some good ideas. But how much of the answer should I give the players? One frustrating issue is that they have come very close, a bunch of times, to getting hold of some important information. But then they just walk away, or forget about it! I’m not going to put a big neon sign saying that they need to do something. It’s up to them what story we make. I just wish that they were ever so slightly more curious about the big mystery.

I have been running this game for almost two years now, and I am starting to think about what the end goal is, and how to get them there. This is kind of like ‘herding cats‘ (there is a literal tabaxi in the party, but that player is not the biggest problem in this regard), and I am honestly not sure if I can get the story to reach some satisfying conclusion. Hopefully it’ll all work out.

“Wraith: the Oblivion” and Shadows

I have been thinking about Wraith: the Oblivion.

In my play through of the old Old World of Darkness games, we are two down with three to go. Vampire and Changeling are done, and seemed to go well. Next on my list are Wraith and Werewolf.

Wraith is a game about regrets. Wait… let me rewind.

In ghost stories, the ghost are almost never the active participants. It is the living person, the quick, who finds and confronts/is confronted by the ghost. The ghost is simply waiting there, for the living to disturb it. So though they are referred to as the Unquiet Dead, they are still somewhat passive.

How do we make a roleplaying game, where you play a ghost? And, importantly, have it be fun?

Any good story is one about conflict. Wraiths are unquiet, restless, because they feel that their story is unfinished. Though they have died, they do not want that to be true. The conflict is with their past, those unfinished or unresolved parts of their lives.

Wraiths is a game about regrets, and the conflict is with the Shadow.

The Shadow is probably one of the best innovations in all the world of darkness games. The shadow is the opposite of the psyche. The player creates the wraith, with all its hopes, dreams and regrets (called in the game Passions), with generate Pathos, a spiritual force that keeps the wraith going. But the wraith also has dark passions, the negative versions of the passions that are about failure, or (self-) destruction. The dark passions generate Angst, which fuels the Shadow.

And the Shadow is played by a different player at the table.

This requires a huge amount of trust. Players often identify with their characters, and want to represent them well. So to give over a portion of your character’s personality, your creation, to be played by a different player is tough. But then they also have to portray the negative aspect of the character’s personality.

Wraith… is kind of a psychodrama.

The shadow wants the wraith to fail. To give up, give in to the worst aspects of the character, and embrace oblivion. (Oblivion is a real and growing force in the underworld of Wraith). Wraith is about resisting your shadow, and finding ways to resolve your passions, represented in the physical world by your fetters. If you can so, successfully, there is a chance you can move on to some better existence.

This is also true in the real world, in case you hadn’t noticed. But most of don’t recognise what our passions are, or notice when our shadows are speaking to us.

Because I have been thinking about Wraith, I have been watching TV shows involving ghosts. These are not my usual cup of tea. One of the best of such shows in recent years are “The Haunting of…” series (The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor). Both are very good, and very true, I feel, to the themes of Wraith. In particular, episode six of The Haunting of Bly Manor is called “The Jolly Corner”, and has one of the best portrayals of a shadow (almost a spectre in fact) I have seen on the screen.

In “The Jolly Corner” (also the name of a Henry James short story), one of the character’s spends a lot of the episode interacting with his own shadow, created by the tragic loss of his loved ones. The shadow (described as a ‘grotesque little demon’, but resembling the character exactly) taunts and tortures his alter-ego with his failures and regrets, exactly the way I imagine would happen in a game of Wraith.

Now I want to see it at the gaming table.

Vampire: the Masquerade – Swansong Cinematic Trailer

Speaking of Malkavians, this new trailer for the video game Vampire: the Masquerade – Swansong has just dropped. It introduces the vampire Leysha, one of the three protagonists who’s story you will follow during the game.

I really like this trailer. Though Swansong will have less mechanics than, say, Bloodlines (or Bloodlines 2, if we ever see it), the story looks really interesting, and exploring the same events from three different perspectives is a cool new idea.

Leysha herself looks really interesting. She has great style, and a tragic backstory, and very different from the comedy sidekick Malkavian trope. It’s not clear exactly what her derangement is, but it’s probably got something to do with their missing daughter.

We don’t have a firm release date for Swansong, but hopefully it will be this year.

Vampire: The Masquerade – The Malkavian Problem

1. The Clans

When Vampire: The Masquerade was first in development, it had to distinguish itself from Dungeons and Dragons. It did this by making the player characters the traditional villains. But at the same time, it couldn’t go too far away. There had to be some touchstones familiar from regular D&D that players can latch on to, to make them more comfortable with what was a pretty outré game idea.

D&D has classes (fighter, wizard, rogue etc), so Mark Rein-Hagen had the idea of clans of vampires. This fed nicely from the strong concept of family, where all vampires are descended from Caine, possibly the same as the biblical figure who murdered his brother. The use of Caine reinforces one theme of the game, that the biggest threat are other vampires, and you may not be able to trust your family (or ‘kindred’).

To make the clans recognisable, he gave them all a gimmick, similar to the D&D classes:

• Brujah – strong angry vampires, a bit like fighters or barbarians
• Gangrel – bestial, rural vampires, a bit like rangers
• Nosferatu – ugly-looking, sneaky vampires, a bit like rogues
• Toreador – charismatic, obsessed with beauty, a bit like bards (ok, that’s a stretch)
• Tremere – sorcerous vampires (literally named after one of the houses of the Order of Hermes in Ars Magica, another Mark Rein-Hagen game), i.e. just wizards
• Ventrue – upper class, snobbish vampires, a bit like clerics or paladins… maybe

These traits were reinforced by genetic flaws, clan curses, passed down from vampire to vampire. The childe of a Nosferatu would also be horrifically ugly, for example.

In the 21st century, the controversial clan are the one I haven’t named yet, the Malkavians. Their clan curse is that they are suffering from some kind of mental derangement.

Other vampires can become deranged of course. The fun of playing a monster that is slowly losing touch with their humanity is what new monstrous behaviour they can replace it with. Malkavians don’t have a monopoly on mental instability. But having a clan, whose whole shtick is that they are the ‘crazy’ ones, raises an important question:

How do we treat this?

Being sensitive to mental health and mental illness is important. Are they there to be pitied, or played for comic relief? Do they deserve to get help?

2. The Mythology

The mythology of the Malkavians has changed a lot over the years, more than any other clan (excepting, perhaps, the Tremere). Originally they were meant to be connected to the world of the faeries (in the same way the Gangrel were going to be connected to Werewolf etc). Faeries were meant to be creatures of chaos, and their derangement made them closer to that chaos. When these other games came out, these connections vanished, or were heavily downplayed.

Then the idea of the madness network appeared, implying that all Malkavians were telepathically connected, and that their derangement was a product of this link. This idea isn’t totally bad. The symptoms of mental illness we exhibit are normally a product of some major stressor, such a traumatic event, or long-term abuse. That would make the derangement a result of dealing with thousands of different voices in your head.

Then there is the discipline (vampiric superpower) Dementation, which I want to quickly gloss over. It was a neat story idea, to portray the Sabbat Malkavians as more twisted and evil than their Camarilla counterparts. But then the Camarilla end up with it, and it turns out that you need to have a derangement to use it…

sigh

I really dislike Dementation as a discipline. I don’t think it adds much to the story of Vampire, except to make it suck a bit more.

3. Sensitivity

How do we portray the Malkavians, and their treatment by the other clans, sensitively? Many people have some variety of mental illness, or have experienced it in the past, or have a family member or friend who has. We shouldn’t alienate others when we play the game. How can we go about making the game fun for everyone, and the Malkavians fun to play?

a. The Malkavians aren’t –that– crazy. They are just people, suffering with both being a vampire and having a mental illness. In this way, we can be more sympathetic to them. Like the Nosferatu, they are marked as being different, and cannot so easily pass as a normal human.

The flies against the whole ‘Fishmalk‘ idea, which I think is pointless and offensive. It is demeaning to people actually struggling with mental illness to have reduced to a comedy stereotype.

But it does make for good roleplaying if you can make the struggle realistic and honest.

b. The Malkavians are special. Here the game could balance the debilitating nature of their curse with extra power, in this case information (through the Madness Network). Information is key in Vampire, as access to information makes you more able to survive and get ahead. And it can be fun to understand more than others, and not share it, for better roleplaying reasons that ‘just being a dick.’ This is kind of what happens in the Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines video game, where if you play as a Malkavian, you have access to dialogue options that other clans do not.

I dislike this idea. Struggling with mental illness is similar to struggling with mental or physical disability. People with these issues are not there to be ‘inspirational’, and their issue is not a ‘superpower’. This is commonly a way of thinking that normally-abled people use to justify, in their own heads, the feelings of guilt they have about having advantages that these people do not. And it’s bullshit! These people are just living their own lives, without reference to you and whatever weird prejudices you have. They just want to be seen as worthwhile humans.

If you play them as strange and arcane, like prophets from greek mythology, that known what will happen but cannot stop it, that could make them more intriguing and cool! Difficult to play though, as who knows how the story is going to turn out.

c. The tragic story. The Malkavians are one step further down the road to damnation than everybody else. Insanity is just an honest response to being an unholy bloodsucker.

This kind of makes them an object lesson, and therefore less fun to play than a Brujah or Toreador for example. But, if you feel like playing that kind of character, as a way to deal with your own personal demons or troubles, go for it.

d. The comedy sidekick.

Fuck off.

4. Conclusion

I’m not sure I have a conclusion at the moment. The Malkavians require you to role-play a bit more carefully than normal, in my opinion. But this is not necessarily a bad thing, in itself.

To make a splat splat with its defining trait being insanity or mental derangement was a bold move in 1991. Would a game designer do that in the 2020s? Maybe not. Does it make it inherently a bad idea though? Again, maybe not.

The Malkavians are popular, because (after the Nosferatu) they are the most distinctive clan. I have read claims that they are in the second tier of popularity, alongside Brujah and Gangrel (but after Toreador and Ventrue). So the concept of playing an even stranger version of a vampire is definitely appealing. We just have to remember to do it sensitively.

Next time: I discuss why the physical deformity of the Metis in Werewolf: the Apocalypse is not offensive (but that name definitely is).

In defence of MacGuffins

A fiction writing terms, a MacGuffin is “is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters”. Made famous by Alfred Hitchcock, a MacGuffin is something that drives the action. These are very common in fiction today. For example, almost every Marvel movie has a MacGuffin of some kind, up to and including the most famous one, which is the Infinity Gauntlet that Thanos spends the entire movie sequence trying to assemble.

Many people criticise MacGuffins as lazy writing. They simply represent the threat, or promise, of a possible resolution. If there is no MacGuffin, there is no story, Consider the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novel and movie(s), which has no MacGuffin, just a mystery. Whereas the recent The Girl in the Spider’s Web film (which is not based on any existing novel), has a James Bond like MacGuffin in the form of the Firefall program, and so is far inferior.

But, I feel that they have an unfair reputation. They could be better used, if they represent the relationship between different characters in the story. For this, I will consider the example of the Ark of the Covenant , in the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. Here the Ark is the MacGuffin, that is true. But it represents different things to different characters, and what it represents changes as the characters evolve.

• The Nazis: the Ark represents power. If they can get their hands on it, they can be powerful.
• René Belloq: the Ark represents history. He constantly steals from Indiana, not just to become rich, but because he wants to be the discoverer, and to be recognised by history.
• Marion Ravenwood: the Ark represents failure. Her father failed to find it, and ruined his life. Because she is bitter about it, she wants nothing to do with it.
• The US government: the Ark is a threat. They want Indiana to go out and neutralise it.
• Indiana Jones: the Ark is a mystery. He needs to find it, but also the story of how it became lost. The journey of finding the Ark is what appeals most to Indy.

However, as as the story develops, the representation changes.

• The Nazis: more than just a weapon, the Ark becomes a ‘divine right’, a recognition of their God-given position of rulership over the world.
• René Belloq: the Ark represents God, a chance to speak with the divine, and be recognised externally as the great man he thinks he is.
• Marion Ravenwood: the Ark represents success, or vindication. By finding it, she can perhaps lay her father’s ghost to rest.
• The US government: actually their position doesn’t change, as demonstrated by the way they hide the Ark in a warehouse. It is still a threat, and best kept away from everyone. The fact that their attitude doesn’t change is why they feature so little in the story.
• Indiana Jones: the Ark represents spirituality, or faith. At the beginning of the movie he is cynical, discarding the supernatural stories about the Ark. By the end he is a true believer, as demonstrated by the ‘closing of the eyes’ scene at the end. He has understood something that Belloq has missed, which is that he a mortal man, flawed, and unfit to look directly on the divine.

If Jones had stayed at home in Chicago, the story would have ended the same, with Belloq and all the Nazis dying. But that’s not the point of the story. The point is the change of the relationships that the characters have with the MacGuffin, and with each other.