Running up to Dreamation 2016, I fell deep, deep down a research hole. I wanted to do an elaborate Burning Wheel scenario for the con, and gosh did I overshoot. It was, well…it was too elaborate for a four hour slot. And I had to spend a lot of time teaching folks how to play Burning Wheel. But the scenario was solid…as long as you planned on playing the game for, I dunno, five or six sessions.
Here are my notes for Divine Favor, my scenario that’s really a campaign frame. The elevator pitch: It’s the year 750, and you’re in a small fortress tucked away in the eastern foothills of the Pyrenees, aka Aquitaine. It’s a tiny moment of semi-peace among Christians, Jews and Saracens. Pepin the Short, the king of the Franks, will bring independent Aquitaine to an end next year.
The pregens are a mix of folks from all the cultures present at this trading crossroads. Also, one of the characters is a werewolf.
Is this something you’d like to see more of in the future? I’m still experimenting with content!
Link to the PDFs on Google Drive.
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Ran my Dreamation scenario this afternoon and it’s really solid. Also highly experimental! I’m trying out some neat tricks that I’ll talk about after the convention.
Running BW again, two things jump out at me:
* Still my favorite framework for playing a confrontational game. So many tools and procedures and options in place to provide a really safe and equitable experience.
* Mind bogglingly busy game relative to where I’ve spent the past few years. My God. I went and laminated those scripting sheets but no way am I putting noobs through any of that at a one shot.
I’m super glad to have put the hard work into the historical research, though. Makes the setting really vibrant and consistent.
One more week!
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I’m starting a new go at Urban Shadows tonight for my wife and another couple and I’m so stoked. Out of my gourd excited. I’m aiming for a very modest three sessions — my wife has never actually played an ongoing game of anything — and cross my fingers that we can extend it from there.
I learned a lot about how to run the game the last time I ran it and I think that’ll help a lot. Things that jump out for me:
* Make sure every character is deeply entrenched and invested in their city. In our last game, every character was a newcomer to the city, fish out of water. Dumb. That strains/breaks so much about the game. So don’t do that.
* While I love the urgency and action of treating every session like a one-shot, that also leads me to making my moves maybe a little too hard for ongoing play. So I’m going in now with an eye toward throttling the pace a bit more rather than stomping the pedal every time.
* The game has a start-of-session move where you keep expanding the situation: each player calls out a faction for someone else, and that someone else dreams up a lead/rumor/situation about that faction. Great tool for a session or two, and not great beyond that. We ended up with a way way messy situation and, again, way too much urgency on too many fronts. So the game felt reactive (not terrible) with the characters constantly losing traction on their own start-of-game “things I care about” statements (sort of terrible).
I re-read through the entire text this week with the experience of having run the game. It’s really helpful! I’m not sure why I couldn’t hook into the examples the first time through but having some actual-play context was helpful to me.
One thing that jumped out, like screaming blazingly loud…actually it was two things. First thing was the statement/admonition that misses are not necessarily failures. I most definitely default to that mode: oh shit, time for me to make a move? Let’s step on the gas. Again with the constant driving urgency and chaos. Again, that’s “fun” but boy it’s hard to, you know, build toward things. (With the acknowledgement that “building toward things” is really iffy when you’re “playing to find out what happens.” It’s a built-in semi-contradiction of the game’s RAW procedures and best practices.)
Really embracing that misses =/= fails opened my head up to the possibilities of “say the consequences and ask”. I think I just kind of skip over that move whenever I run a PbtA game, even though it’s the logical result of misses not being failures. Maybe because it feels redundant with Act Under Fire 7-9? Probably.
Anyway! In Urban Shadows there’s, you know, a whole paragraph talking about ways to deal with offering consequences for success. The one that jumped out at me? Making Corruption the consequence. Presumably with fictional dressing to make it extra-awful. But boy howdy does that potentially open up the Corruption economy. It’s easy-ish to sidestep that economy if a player super-duper does not want to engage it, because the written triggers are explicit: your Corruption drama move, refusing a debt, all that. But lordy, adding Corruption as an option to literally every move in the game? And it shows up once, once in the text. And once in the long example. A tiny little dose of something awesome, as well as really important.
Funny the stuff you learn when you read.
Now my big worry/challenge is coming up with a city to play in. Nobody at the table has enough shared experience with cities other than Phoenix (or Dark Phoenix as we played in last campaign), so just picking a city or city archetype out of a hat is equally good/bad I guess for everyone. A big west coast metropolis would be fun, as would be a really old east coast city.
I may also pitch 750AD Toulouse and put my Werewolves in Aquitaine research to new/better use. Very very tempting, although “cities” were kind of small relative to modern cities — maybe the tens of thousands? But as I discovered in my research, just tons of cultural exchange and juicy intersectionalism.
I think Magpie will have some essays about playing in historical settings in Dark Streets but who else has hands-on experience with what may need to be tweaked? I know Brand Robins ran/is running something historical and French. Anyone else?
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I was talking with Nicholas Hopkins in one of those #rpgaday threads about “your best session.” Turns out my run of Sagas of the Icelanders at NewMexicon last year was MadJay Brown’s, and that’s flattering, but you know what? I’d kind of forgotten all about that session.
Instead, I still think about how I could not pull together my session of Tenra Bansho Zero to my satisfaction. This, despite more than one participant telling me they had a good time.
My inner critic is at least 10x louder than my loudest player.
There’s probably a word for it, and it’s probably rooted in some unholy cocktail of narcissism, insecurity and magical thinking.
I mean seriously: of all the things one might choose to fixate on, to constantly strive to improve, I chose elaborate make-believe? OTOH I’m not totally persuaded that another fixation would be any healthier or more rewarding. Maybe financially rewarding, if I really hunkered down on career stuff or investing or whatever.
The upsides seem pretty apparent: improving my batting average. I don’t want anyone at my table to walk away dissatisfied. I even know that in many cases, that’s not even within my powers to decide. Maybe the game system or the genre won’t click, maybe there will be some personal chemistry problem, I mean who knows. There are so many variables. But I still have this feeling that if I shine brightly enough, I can brute-force everyone past those other problems.
But the downsides, oh the downsides. I run at least one very good event at every convention I go to, and my other events are typically better-than-average. Those disappear into my rear-view mirror pretty fast, like within a week. But I remember every beat of my middling-blah reverse Burning Empires thing I ran (3 years ago?), a middling-blah Burning Wheel long-con thing from 2 years ago as well as my disappointing Werewolves of Aquitaine game from Dreamation this year, my flubbed Tenra Bansho Zero thing at NewMexicon, the sad trad pandas at my Night Witches table in Tucson that I just couldn’t pull along by force of will. Those are all alive and well for me.
I’m honestly curious about this: how common is this? And how do you decide what skills to work, what areas to prioritize? I’ve got thoughts about that but right this minute I’m skeptical of my own motives.
Or have you settled on a good-enough plateau? How did you decide to settle?
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I’m tempted to do the show-offy thing where I reference some tiny sliver of time and space that literally tens of people might have heard of, and they’re all total history nerds so whatever I pitched would get ‘splained into oblivion in a hundred post thread.
But if I go big, then I plow into the intersection of Pop Culture and Appropriation and nobody walks away from that car crash.
Oh yeah, I’d definitely go with the first option. Obscurity and unrelatability are both good defenses once you’re out in the world. I’m currently totally in love with my “Werewolves in Aquitaine” setting I squandered on a stupid Burning Wheel one-shot, and I want to swing back around to it. Prompting/modeling/shaping a premodern head space to play in is also one of my favorite Major Design Challenges, and I’ll probably spend my entire life trying to figure out how to do it. So I have to leave the second half of my question unanswered for now. It’s sorta-kinda been done! King Arthur Pendragon does some interesting stuff with, at least, cryptohistorical Arthurian values, but I’m not sure it’s directly portable or even the thing I’d want to do.
I had a longer post in mind about the (suit)ability of games to serve a journalistic function, but I just don’t have the energy to get into a long thing about it. Sorry. (The tl;dr answer is “yes, with massive caveats” and maybe I’ll write more about it down the road.)
Two more days! Is everyone feeling #indieAF ?
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I recently attended BurningCon, a convention devoted to the games published by BWHQ in Queens, NY: The Burning Wheel, Burning Empires, Torchbearer, and Mouse Guard are the big ones. BWHQ haven’t released as many titles as some publishers but their work continues to be some of the most influential in both my own gaming life… Continue reading Returning To My Roots: BurningCon 2023 →