As soon as you say “narrative authority”, a large body of gamers get all sweaty. After last night’s session of Deluge (played with A Dirty World for the system again), I wonder about the immediate rejection narrative authority sometimes suffers. I wonder this because I’m not sure it’s actually all that novel an idea, so I wonder what the adamant persons on both “sides” are actually on about.

I don’t often get a chance to play. I’m very frequently the GM. But recently the others at my table have been more and more eager to take up the mantle, and so I’m playing, and so I’m thinking about playing. Here’s one of the thinks I thunk. In A Dirty World, your character’s capabilities are always changing because when you lose a contest, your “skills” change. So if you get punched in the eye in a fair fight, your Courage goes down one and your Wrath goes up. This might change what your best option might be, which has the nifty side-effect of avoiding the “I hit him with my sword. I hit him with my sword. I hit him with my sword.” effect. But it does something else, too.

When I play I am well rewarded by success. And here’s where the sneakiness of narrative authority comes in. Whenever I am declaring an action that I know results in a mediated conflict — that is, whenever I say “I shoot her”, knowing that the dice will come out to decide what happens as a result of this shooting — the fact that we go straight to system for resolution means I am stealing narrative authority from the GM! Granted I am placing it in the hands of the dice (you die, I die, we flee, they get polymorphed into frogs — whatever, when it’s system-created it’s narrative authority out of the GM’s hands!) but even that is slippery.

I like to win, like I said. That means that, while I am playing a personality I want to explore, I built the character to reflect the personality, and I did that by making her good at the things I want to succeed in. That also means I am going to steer most conflicts towards these strengths if I can and that means I get rewarded (by victory) and I play this character. Because I steer towards my strength and therefore victory, though, the outcome of a conflict is skewed by my tactical ability. That means that while I don’t mandate narrative direction, I do certainly have enormous say by way of this indirect method. And so can anyone else, in practically any game. Perhaps especially in ones that place all authority explicitly in the hands of the GM but then have nice clear resolution systems. When I say, “I would like to persuade her to give use the books by bribing her with my shotgun,” I know I have skewed the likely direction of the story in favour of getting those books. And the better I am at playing the game, the more control I have.

I noticed this because any time I want my character to accomplish anything, the first thing I do is look at my character sheet and ask myself, what am I most likely to succeed with? That is, I know what I want to accomplish and see my character’s abilities as a toolkit for doing that. Naturally I pick the best tool for the job. After a long fight, Charity had taken a lot of hits to her Courage which slid to Wrath — she’s tired and bruised and on a short fuse. Kam is looking to take her down a notch in front of her compatriots by mocking her. I look at the sheet for Charity — I get by far the most dice on the table with Graceful Wrath — shooting the unarmed.

There is no hesitation — Charity is mocked after a long and dangerous night, and she goes straight to the shotgun. “Now is not the time.” But that’s me making the narration happen. The GM didn’t necessarily want the scene to go there and the ramifications might be deep (but I am partially in control of that now). As long as I have the authority to declare my actions, I have the ability to take (probabilistic) control of the narrative.

It delights me every time I discover that a conflict is mostly smoke, or can at least be seen from an angle that makes it look that way.

–BMurray

I’m still battling internally over the value of the PDF-target document. Not whether or not it’s worthwhile, but rather just how valuable it is. Like, in dollars. This is important because there is some desire from fans for a Diaspora PDF but there is some imperfectly qualified resistance to the idea from within the VSCA. I think this stems from the fact that the value of a PDF is unbelievably plastic. Here’s some data that illustrates this.

I have dozens of PDFs of role-playing games. I’ve paid between nothing and about ten bucks for them. I’ve read maybe half and played basically none.

The PDF of our book represents the entire source data to produce the book-as-artifact. I’m really proud of that thing, that book, and so I value ownership of that PDF very highly. How high? The VSCA needs to put a price tag on that I guess. It will vary over time — if Diaspora doesn’t sell a single hardcopy for a month, obviously the value of its production material goes down.

PDFs of games sell for between two bucks and twenty bucks at cool places like RPGNow. Yet recently, for charity, a package that sent twenty bucks to Haiti got the consumer some fourteen-hundred bucks “worth” of PDF data. I think I worked out the mean value of those PDFs to about eighty cents. That’s an amazing disparity. That could never ever happen with physical books, for example — you’re never going to get Barnes & Noble giving you fourteen-hundred bucks in hardcover books for twenty bucks, which they then ship to Haiti. There are excellent reasons for this, bearing mostly on the delivery bottlenecks, and there is a whole other discussion about the actual cost of the sum finally raised (the efficiency as a process for fundraising and who paid for the inefficiency and how much) and most of it will have to use fictional numbers (estimated lost sales, sales delayed or lost from server outage, and so on).

And then there’s Deluge which I released for seven bucks under a share-alike license. This had an effect that I hoped for — lots of people were happy to pay for something they were allowed to share. It’s what people tell me happens with PDFs, so I wanted to use a licensing scheme that expected it to happen — rather than say “here’s the PDF, it’s not for free, please don’t share it with anyone but there’s no DRM” I chose to say “here’s the PDF, it’s not for free, but we acknowledge you’re going to do what you want with your thing, so go nuts”. That seems to work — my expectation is that when people pay for something they have a sense of ownership and resist distributing it widely.

So anyway, with this enormous plasticity, obviously a Diaspora PDF would need to deal with our range adequately. We have people who own the book and reasonably would want the PDF for free. We have people who would be delighted to pay anywhere from two to twenty bucks for it. And we have the authors who have a large but unquantified interest in not letting it from our bosoms.

It seems like the solution (and this is not a policy as I haven’t put it before the VSCA itself) is to ransom it.

Basically, we need to set our value on it and say it clearly. Then collect pledges through some reputable pledgerizer (I’m sure Greg Stolze knows of one) until that value is met. Then release the PDF for free. This involves us not wishy-washying around that valuation — we need to decide what it really is and then be loud and clear. And if we can’t get what we value it at, we don’t release it. Maybe we ransom again later when the value goes down. But most importantly, it would only be ethical for use to release it for free when we meet that value, otherwise we were lying about the value.

–BMurray

So I put up Deluge last night for sale, as I already noted. I thought, though, that I had better talk about what’s in it because, well, it costs seven bucks.

Deluge is 37 pages of material, about 30 of which are strictly game-related stuff. It’s in PDF format using a version that lets me add bookmarks and hyperlinks, so it’s not fully functional on some kinds of software and devices, but you should be able to read it just fine. I have an ePub and MOBI version kicking around on my drive at home (and on my Kindle) that also works and if you want a copy of that just give me a shout.

It costs seven bucks but you can share it for free with anyone you want. Yeah that means that you can re-host it and give it away to the world. That’s cool by me — that’s part of the experiment. It’s only available through Lulu at the moment but I’m looking into getting its stuffed into more popular locales in the next short while. Probably in the complete “package” with all formats. Well, all the formats I have, I mean.

It contains, aside from some original artwork and thankfully terse fiction:

A discussion of the premise of the setting.

Concrete ways to organize and design characters so that they have cool things to do in the setting and with each other.

Ideas for developing communities so that they are interesting to discover and interact with.

Random tables for finding out what communities have, need, hate, and love.

A method for building a session around your home town, plus fourteen meters of water and a hundred and fifty years without modern technology.

Details for angels, bears, and giant squid.

A discussion of the kinds of secrets the GM will want to invent, keep, and reveal in the process of participating in a Deluge story.

Factoids about rain.

In the spirit of Diaspora and my own preferences, even though Deluge is a setting, it’s also still a toolkit. Yeah I know, settings have been traditionally anti-toolkit, but rather reference material for a campaign. Honestly, I hate that. Remember Thieve’s World, the game aid? What was cool about Thieve’s World for me was not the characters or the stats or the story lines already unfolding in the city. Honestly I barely read any of that because it wasn’t mine, I didn’t want to memorize it, and I knew my players would not read it or listen to me read it. What was cool about that was the map and the tone.

So Deluge is all about this kind of thing too — the core assumption is that you, the potential consumer, want to tinker. You want to take something and make it yours. You want to be as unhindered by canon as possible, so all you need is a premise and a methodology and you will be off and running making your own awesome game. Because that’s what GMs do, at least where I come from. So that’s what it delivers — premise, methodology, atmosphere, and some examples to spark your own imagination. In a sense I’m selling you a good idea rather than a game or even a setting. A good idea and a way to use it.

I am certain that my idea of what play is (as a GM) is not universal. There are people who want encounter details in a setting document. They will hate this document but, hopefully, they already know that because Diaspora is full of clues regarding my preferences and they already hate that game (or know they will hate it). However, if your idea of a good time is drawing over a map of your home town, documenting its destruction and its treasures, and then slowly revealing this to your friends during a rousing game with your favourite system, this is certainly built for you. It’s built for me, after all.

–BMurray

You can grab it from Lulu for about seven bucks. As promised, it’s licensed under CC non-commercial share-alike. Share and enjoy. I have a MOBI and an ePub version kicking around here too and may put a package up at RPGNow or similar in the near future. Looks okay on my Kindle.

Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue have already weighed in. I don’t have anything new to add except possibly my opinion which I think is completely uninteresting. Facts will carry the day and this is clearly a skirmish in the war that will occupy the next several years in the publishing business. The expected (and apropos) analogy with dinosaurs and mammals has been made repeatedly. I believe I alluded to it myself last year sometime.

The only thing I really care about is the fact that I enjoy layout as an art form and the electronic book market, given the direction it’s heading, is poised to change what that is a very great deal. And that’s scary. It means that just as the tools we use for layout are becoming mature, the game is changing under them and again layout is complicated. Complicated is interesting. I’m cool with that. Just scared.

Anyway, is making me re-think Deluge as a product and that’s also a good thing because it lets me address my release fear by not releasing. It’s currently designed as a hybrid product — a PDF that’s built on a US Letter page scaffold with the recognition that some significant body of readers will want to print it. It looks pretty printed — even clever — right now. It also works as a PDF. But as it is an experiment in current electronic publishing, it seems Steve Jobs has insisted that I make it work on a third axis. Okay fine.

So, it has to work in print. It has to work as a functional PDF (that is, printed and on screen). It has to work as a re-flowable form like MOBI or ePub. ePub is a supposedly heavily supported (partially designed) by Adobe. Yet the ePub output from InDesign looks like crap by default, assuming you concentrated on making a cool looking page. Pages are primary to InDesign’s operation and yet the ePub output has no page. You have to think in terms of the “story” and ignore the page for this to work (and yes that means making images inline, which almost always sucks and a half). Okay, I can do this.

Paper and PDF are paginated. ePub (and whatever I convert to from there) is not. I want to have products cross-correlate, so I think Toph’s page insertion scheme is ideal here — at the beginning of each page, the text will contain a reference to the page number, so a reflowed version will identify each page as it would have started in the paged version. I will try to automate this with InDesign and have some ideas. This is fairly inobtrusive (compared with treating the reflowed text as canonical and numbering some fundamental unit of the text, like paragraphs, which is slicker but uglier) but not without controversy. In particular, the implicit declaration that the paged version is canonical strikes me as wrong.

Images have to go inline. That means my lovely margin usage will vanish and images will simply interrupt the text. I can cope.

Sidebars have to go inline. Lots of electronic formats support sidebars but they all suck. The problem is that there’s just not enough real-estate on screen to give sidebars the function that they have on a page — they are either completely intrusive or they are a push-button away and switch between dominant and non-existent. These choices suck. Instead I think I will re-write so that they are not sidebars. This has worked for technical books for ages. Sidebars may be mostly a gimmick anyway–I’m not convinced of their utility beyond breaking up the page and providing visual landmarks.

Cross-references have to be logical rather than literal because they need to become actual links. This is all good.

The deepest issue is one of legibility — it’s not clear to me that a single set of choices will create a legible document when printed on US Letter as when viewed on the screen in print-preview (PDF) form as when viewed in a reflowable form. I can actually ignore the reflowable version — it’s pretty much guaranteed to be legible because its presentation is reader and user dependent.  But for the two presentations that are most deeply at odds, there are serious issues. I’m pretty sure, for example, that it will pay off to use a larger typeface than I would for print-only target because the sorts of devices used to view PDFs are myriad. But this is likely to make print ghastly and paper-intensive unless the intended print form is two-up or four-up. Can I make that assumption? I suppose I can declare it in the product.

The bottom line, though, is that doing layout just became a very different kind of job for RPGs. Novelists have it easy — one typeface and every page the same shape. No diagrams, no tables (ugh tables — that’s going to suck too), and one typeface. But with all these things there are so many opportunities for the RPG layouterizer to make elegant and beautiful choices. Most of which are undermined by the new technology. I think, though, that honestly Apple and Amazon have together changed the landscape.

It will be years before things shake out, but it’s clear that the shaking has started. And I am in a better position to be a mammal than a dinosaur. But fans of that analogy should keep clear in their heads that we still also have a lot of birds in this modern world. Recall that when mammals started eating their eggs, dinosaurs took to the air.

Predicting the future is a mug’s game. The best you can do is react, especially if you’re well positioned to do so cheaply.

–BMurray

Last night we did a great run playing (I finally got to play!) in the Deluge setting but using Greg Stolze’s A Dirty World as the core system. This delivered a very different experience from our previous game using Reign, but just as (more, for me) satisfying. Here’s the current text as I write this but as always the most current is at the wiki.

Shipbuilding

Scout Charity Spence — Brad Murray
Scavenger Nemo — Tim Dyke

I (Byron) took the mighty horned helmet tonight for a further exploration of Brad’s intriguing Deluge setting.

I opted to use A Dirty World for a few reasons; 1) I knew it would work since it was based on Stolze’s One Roll Engine, 2) I had a pretty cool couple of visuals, 3) the table is amazingly forgiving for my awkward at times GMing and 4) I wanted Brad to play in the setting he was describing.

Charity (Brad) and Nemo (Tim) have been called before the Board of Technology with a mission, there has been no contact from the community of Port Haney for a few months and there have been rumours of something… odd going on in the area former called Maple Ridge. One garrulous old Technocrat of Theology understands why the renowned scout Charity is going, but why send that skulking scavenger Nemo? Charity graciously offers to leave Tim behind and take the Technocrat in his place. The curmudgeon quickly defers this honour and withdraws his complaint.

The Council of Technocrats concede to send a mail man in advance of the two and to arrange transport from the Centre to Port Haney.

Charity and Nemo head down off the mountain to the small seaside community of Burrard, where a skiff awaits them. Before they can board they are offered refreshments and relaxation, but since the two are under an hour into their journey they decline.

Nemo and Charity find themselves beseeched by Pearl of Burrard who implores the two to take a small, simple package to her sister Pearl at the Centre. Nemo and Charity see no reason to doubt the earnest woman and quickly agree to her requests. Nemo gets some fresh cheese and seal jerky as a bonus.

The pair are poled up the inlet towards the area formerly known as Port Moody. The captain of the skiff dumps them a bit further north than usual in the midst of the jungle and quickly hightails it out of there. Leaving Nemo and Charity to find their own way to the Centre with a vague wave of his hand. Nemo and Charity have been in this sort of situation before, without sharing a word they scope out the shadows following them. When the leader steps from behind a crumbled ruin, both are ready for them.

Tim and Brad both rolled very strong Observation rolls here so knew how many people were there and almost down to how old their clothing was.

“Halt. We aim to relieve you of those items you’re carrying.” begins the scruffy attired leader holding a massive machete.

“Listen,” begins Nemo, “we know what you need and want, we’re like you. We can help reconnect the mail and…”

BOOM

Charity unleashes a blast from her shotgun, killing the would-be bandit outright. From the tress, both note the other shadows slinking into the wet, shadows, intent now on easier prey.

Tim rolled a Persuasive Honesty roll, while Brad rolled Vigorous Wrath. Tim got the higher set, which ruined the set the NPC rolled, allowing Brad to pepper them with buckshot. ORE is a great system.

BJM: Charity rolled Graceful Courage — a calm and accurate discharge from the shotgun. It was only later I got wrathful from losing some rolls.

JBB: One of these days we’ll have a game with negotiating that ends without gunfire.

BJM: Dude, there’s one later in the session that ends in LESBIAN SEX — you are a hard man to please.

Along the way Nemo offers to fix a farmer’s tractor, the farmer points him to a rusted out set of metal with four large rubber tires half sunken in a field. They ask about Rose of Burrard, the farmer, lonely sounds intrigued but hasn’t heard of her but directs them on towards the Centre.

As they approach the Centre they’re accosted by Jak and Bil, two young guards standing atop the berm that surrounds the Centre. A berm made of the concrete of the collapsed high rises surrounded the centre, behind the berm is a deep moat that’s been expanded and deepened multiple times. Jak and Bil do their best to stop the two travellers but once they find out it is the scout Charity and notorious scavenger Nemo they quickly become fawning fanboys and direct the two into the Centre.

The Centre (Coquitlam Centre) is a shopping mall that’s seen better days, the roof leaks, the metal has corroded into rust and one former shopping department has collapsed outwards and been converted into a floating dock used for loading and offloading supplies.

Brad’s built a handy percentile role for deluge and it was here I realized what the Centre needed.

Nemo, being an old hand in scavenging finds the old directory and leads Charity down to the administration level looking for the Mayor of the Centre. One problem, the bottom floor of the Centre is in about 5 inches of water, but they find an old drunk, Charity kicks him awake and he waves them in the general direction of Zed, the mayor. “It’s the busy shop with the people going in and out of it.”

Back on the second floor, Nemo quickly finds Zed’s, and they quickly find Zed, sitting behind a counter and living in seeming luxury, as above him a flickering but steadily burning lightbulb above his head. On the walls behind him are archaic power tools. He doesn’t seem to do much business, focusing on his mayoral duties. Charity and Nemo introduce themselves and Zed quickly shuts down the shop and insists they dine with him.

They follow him down to the dining hall (food court) there are holes in the wall but as long as there aren’t any holes overhead, the people of the Centre seem happy to live in the wet. Zed orders a suckling pig (or two) roasted for this auspicious occasion. Nemo watches them handcrank the piglet and offers a complex solution that Zed nods and smiles and says sure. Nemo fashions an automatic roasting device, using an old chain from a chainsaw or bike and a treadmill. Nemo suggests they walk on it, but one clever lad thinks walking another pig on it would be much easier. The crowd gasps in awe as Nemo’s Roasting Device works and he gains much standing in the community of this delapitated mall. Meanwhile, Charity and Zed talk business. Zed confesses that things aren’t great in the Centre, they’ve lost their shipwright and without one things look bleak. Perhaps Charity could find a way to… liberate one from Port Haney? Charity believes in the necessity of a shipwright to the further survival of the Centre and agrees.

Tim rolled a Patient Demonstration success so taught the people a better way to roast meat, while Brad failed in a roll against Zed (NPC) but only barely, but that’s enough to see that kidnapping a shipwright is essential for the Centre to survive.

BJM: In failing her check, Charity gets Corruption shifted up. She’s accepted the idea that kidnapping is okay. Not the character I intended, but cooler in a way.

Nemo discovers Rose lives in the Centre, selling chickens and eggs to meagre profits and eking out a living. Nemo delivers the package from Pearl, but something doesn’t jibe, she grabs it too quickly and goes to tuck it away, but the wrapping rips and a stained mahogany box peeks through. Nemo and Charity converge on the poor woman, Nemo grabs back the box realizing this is something valuable from the Mountain whereas Charity wants to aid Rose. Rose’s attempt to escape fail and Nemo grabs the box, just before the butt of Charity’s shotgun smacks his elbow. Rose makes a desperate plea to the scavenger soul of Nemo, “Why does it always have to go UP the mountain? There are people down here who need just as much… no more… than those atop the mountain. We need this to survive.” Nemo acknowledges the wisdom of these words and permits her to keep the box, but he is a bit envious of her, since he hasn’t found much to scavenger out east yet.

Ok… Tim and Brad both Cunningly Observed Rose was up to something. Then Tim when to grab it back Vigorous Defiance whereas Brad wanted to aid Rose with Vigorous Courage while Rose tried Graceful Defiance to get away. Tim got the best roll, then Brad and Rose got none. However, Rose used Persuasive Honesty to convince Tim to give her back the back, with Brad’s gobble dice eating up Tim’s successes Rose kept the box.

Which was a McGuffin until I realized it was a tech McGuffin!

BJM: Charity’s Vig/Cour roll was an attempt to smack Nemo’s arm away with the butt of her shotgun. Her failure causes a shift on Wrath. Gettin’ mad here.

In the morning the pair met a salty old sailor, likely the only one brave enough to navigate the Pitt Bay (Pitt River) in the Centre. An uneventful crossing and Nemo disappointed he can’t recognize any potential looting places. Charity and the captain trade anecdotes.

On the Ridge side, they’re deposited north of Port Haney. They’re being watched but in a casual way. They arrive at night and in the dark, a guttering torch invites them onwards. They’re escorted to a tavern, when outside the tavern two lean, viscous seadog walruses leap out of the water, teeth sharp and savage. Charity inquires about these, seadogs, turns out they’ve been around for about 30 years and came from the sea and only in the past decade have they domesticated them. But they’re still more beast than pet.

Bedtime. Except Charity and Nemo want to explore. Nemo stumbles in the muck and rain and is immediately escorted back inside to share scavenging stories, which works as a great distraction for Charity to explore the town. The ships here are indeed much, much better than any she’s recently seen. There are entire logbooms near the shipyards for shaping. She sketches some rough drawings for the Technocrats atop the mountain. The boats are sturdier, leak less, ride higher in the water, seem to almost skim across the surface.

Tim failed his Sneak roll, Brad succeeded.

In the morning they meet the mayor of the town, a hearty young woman who commands respect. She and Charity show an immediate familiarity. They swap maps but the mayor is holding something back. Charity, in kind, holds back some of her maps too; pulling out an older map of the area. Nemo, slightly bored and missing the civility (and ruins) of the city spots a young girl bounding up and down bursting to share something with someone. It’s the mayor’s child (a girl of 10 – 12) and she rushes up to Nemo, who refuses to ask the question until to bursts out of her like a waterfall off a cliff, “You haven’t seen oobec… that’s where you wanna see… oobec… that’s where the trees come from.”

“Can you spell that for me?” asks Nemo.

“No. It’s spelt like it sounds I reckon,” she replies.

“Where is it? Can you draw it for me?”

So she does, by drawing an arrow pointing upwards at a tree on the floor.

Frustrated, Nemo filches a map from Charity.

Opposed roll, Tim tries to Steal from Brad. And it’s close, both got sets. 2×6 for Tim, 2×4 for Brad.

BJM: Charity’s rolls is a Vigorous Courage — basically if Nemo fails, she notices and punches him in the mouth. She fails and again takes a shift increasing her Wrath. Grr grr. Pretty soon she is going to be more effective punching the weak than in fair fisticuffs. As a player, I KNOW I am going to use whatever is most effective to get what I want.

Nemo has the girl point on the correct map he’s just lifted where these trees are. It turns out a bit further north from where they landed. Charity and Nemo talk later about what they’ve learned, Charity pulls out an even older map and between the two of them they decipher ‘oobec’ refers to an old UBC Research Forest to the north of Maple Ridge.

Brad and Tim succeed on a Knowledge roll.

In the last scene, Charity is trying to convince the leader of the community here (a strong woman like Charity herself) to send some shipwrights to Coquitlam Centre. Charity is prepared to kidnap (and her increasing Corruption ensures that) but Brad wants to resolve it ethically if possible. They discuss passionately and agree to work something out, though it’s not clear exactly what got resolved. Charity seems to have made her point, but the proof will be in the pudding.

Brad makes a Corrupt Persuasion check here because Charity’s Corruption has increased, so this is essentially a seduction. Certainly the scene contains some sexual tension. Tim assists with a Patient Demonstration roll, giving charity a width increase which seals the deal. I (Brad) read this as Tim actually making the point, but the leader’s personal interest in Charity is what actually makes her accede.

Charity’s success nets her another shift for Corruption.

BJDK: Considering I didn’t take a note about the rolls, and winged it from memory, it’s interesting to see how Charity could become a Wrathful, Vengeful Scout.

Charity dismisses Nemo with a wave and snuffs the light.

And that’s where we ended it.

–BMurray (with B.Kerr)

Leaning towards this license for Deluge:

Deluge by Brad J. Murray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Comments? Do you even care?

–BMurray

Here’s something that the RPG system ORE, particularly as seen in Greg Stolze’s Reign, does super well. It rewards focus and it does it in a way that requires no book keeping. This is awesome. Its delivery is ephemeral but highly desirable by players. It doesn’t tie to character advancement (directly) or anything like that but still players steer right into it, on purpose, every single time. The thing is the Passions.

And you can jam these into any system and it will be just as awesome.

In Reign, each character has three Passions. They are:

Duty: this is the thing that you are compelled to do according to your personal ethics. “Keep the peace,” “Get the mail through,” “Destroy evil,” “Never compromise” … you get the idea. It can change, but infrequently.

Craving: this is the thing you are compelled to do because of your own weakness. “I like killing,” “Another beer couldn’t hurt,” “Blondes.” It never changes.

Mission: this is the thing you are compelled to do because it’s of immediate interest. It changes whenever it’s resolved, so it could easily change every session.

Now, whenever a character is involved in a conflict where dice get thrown, if the player can reasonably claim that one of these is progressed by the conflict, then she gets a die (a bonus to success basically). If she can narrate two in, two dice. All three? Awesome; three dice.

The important part of this is that it can happen as often as the player likes because it’s ephemeral — the only payoff is immediate and then it goes away. But the ramifications are deep — now what used to be just a brawl is actually about your sociopathy (“I like killing”). That simple brawl is now character-defining. We’re seeing the real thing now. And characters that have some nobility do well when they exercise it, if that’s their duty and so players, who love to succeed, get paid in social/psychological currencies for doing it. You’d be surprised at how many people will pay to succeed at something that will be detrimental to them. Yay I win! I won custody of the kid! Now I can stay home and not adventure forever or at least until college! Maybe that’s a bad example.

Anyway, that’s scaffolding. What I really want to erect here has to do with the last one, the Mission. In Reign the player sets this, but I stumbled on something really swell and obvious-looking: if the GM sets this, things become wonderful.

It’s generally accepted (with some dissent, of course, and we don’t need to cover that here) that railroading is bad. GM as storyteller manipulating players so their characters will behave according to script is boring and aggravating and sours milk, encourages fungal growth, and decays teeth. We all agree to that (well, “people like us” do, as my old philosophy prof would say). But what setting the Mission for the characters does is far more fertile. It more cuts a path than puts them on the rails.

If the GM sets the Mission for all characters to “Get the mail to Burnaby Mountain”, several things happen that are desirable:

The group, all having the same Mission, have a mechanically relevant common goal.

The GM is allowed to talk explicitly to the players through a mechanical medium about what she wants. No embarrassing meta-discussion, just a scene and then, “Here’s your Mission statements.”

The players are not in any way constrained to this objective. They just succeed slightly more often when the act in service of it. Or can convince the others that they are, which when generating narration, is practically the same thing. This is downright Darwinian.

Players can wonder well wide of the path, but they succeed a little more often when they are on it, and they succeed a little more often when they are trying to get back to it. This gives everyone the freedom to do as they please within the game world, which is sometimes desirable, but also gives the GM good reason to expect that certain points in her preparation will actually get revealed. The plot may not unfold as expected (which I love love love) but at least we have reason to expect that the objective will get pursued somehow.

This, it seems to me, is a powerful tool for most play styles — usually at the very least the GM is holding some secret that she wants to reveal. She wants the little thrill of seeing the players react with surprise and say, “Wow, cool.” But to deliver secrets, she needs the players to have their characters pursue them, and most existing mechanism are unreliable or unsatisfying (silent expectation being the most common).

So that’s my big Reign mod. Have the GM set the characters’ Missions.

–BMurray

I am going to publish the setting, Deluge, sometime in the next month or two. I did a bunch of new writing for it on the weekend and I feel inspired to do some artwork for it and I had fun experimenting with layout on it. So it’s fun, and you can have it if you want it. I want it — I’m playing it and having a great time.

Here are the four three experiments.

Systemless Experimentation

It’s an experiment in systemless setting design. Not just in whether or not that can be done — it’s been done often enough before that I see no essential controversy there — but whether there is a process for doing it. Is there a way to reliably take an idea and turn it into something others can and will use as a setting? So this process is pretty straightforward:

Describe the idea

Obviously you have to tell the audience what the setting is about. I’m looking at a very rapid development cycle here, so I’m not relying on writing a ton of exposition and fiction. I’m also using an original idea, so I can’t just point to existing canon and say, “like that.” Instead I am relying on the three solutions we used in Diaspora:  micro-fiction that delivers tiny scenes that illustrate how I feel about some aspect of the setting, mechanisms that deliberately create the tone I intend both in play and while reading, and a willingness to back away from stuff that I think is cool for the user to create.

Answer the question, “Who are these guys?”

Who are the agents in this place? Who will the players play? What kinds of characters live here that are worth pretending to be?

Answer the question, “What do they do?”

What do the characters do that’s fun? How do these activities chain together to form adventures? Why do the players care to pretend to do what the characters do? In Deluge we find the answer is (concisely) that they go on missions essential to the survival of communities that protect and love them. That last turns out to be important. Another post though.

The fact that they “go on missions” is not quite enough, though, and so there are mechanisms in Deluge that imply, suggest, bribe, and even bamboozle players into the mission mentality. Mission-driven gaming is one of the most profitable forms for me because you can get going so very fast and everyone knows what’s what right away. It’s why practically every MMO that makes a crapton of cash uses a quest scheme of some kind. And you can always excise it — if you sit down to play and describe the world and the players already know what they want to do, you can just sit back and watch it happen, regardless of whether or not a mission has been offered.

Answer the question, “Who opposes them?”

What is the nature of the conflicts that the characters will face but, more importantly, what are the agents on the other side of them? What are the monsters of this setting? In this setting the opposition takes many forms. The ultimate agents opposing humanity are the angels, but more immediately characters will confront other humans with opposing interests, wild animals, the environment itself, and the decaying ill-understood ruins of the old world.

This is tricky in a system-free setting because obviously you can’t provide stat blocks and stat blocks are part of what people expect to pay for. But you can talk about the kinds of mechanisms that need to come in to play for each form of opposition and you can talk vaguely about representation (these guys are strong and smart, but slow and ugly). So that’s a challenge.

Interface to systems

Finally, to be systemless, I choose to be explicit about where the user needs to attach her system. So throughout the document there are passages that are solely about ways to make the intended effect happen in any system, sometimes with examples from specific systems. Mostly, however, the concepts are general and the solutions will require a little work (but not a lot) from the user. The assumption underpinning this is that one person at every table (at least) loves this kind of thing. As evidence I offer the fact that most of the posts about Diaspora are about how to make it do something else. I expected that. I love that it came true. It might be an essential fact of populist role-playing games that they succeed when they facilitate mis-playing them.

Publication

Publication itself is going to be an experiment as well. I intend to publish Deluge solely as a PDF (I know you’ve read my opinions and blitherings about PDFs but a hallmark of experimentation is that it could come out either way — you don’t experiment when you believe you know the outcome with any certainty). I intend to make it cheap because it’s getting written whether I publish it or not because it’s in my head and trying to get out.

Perhaps oddly (but it’s my experiment so I can do what I want) I am laying it out as though it were destined for print. There are a few reasons for this, but foremost is that laying out for electronic use turns out to be a dull and aggravating job. It holds no artistic interest for me and the only academic interests in it have already been resolved and I see no need to re-explore them. Most of them stem from correlation between re-flowable and paged texts anyway, and this is not an issue here.

I am, however, laying it out as though it were destined for your printer. It will be on standard US Letter sized pages, though oriented in landscape, and it will use fonts and graphics that I have chosen partially for their functionality on the low resolution devices we have in our homes (and, secretly, our offices). It will assume double sided printing and binding, but only because that doesn’t hinder it much if you choose to print it single sided and staple the corner.

I will test its viability as a document viewed on a screen, but I don’t care if it works on my Kindle.

Licensing

Deluge will be licensed under a Creative Commons license allowing free use, modification, distribution and all that good stuff provided it’s not for commercial purposes. I’ll be selling it but you can give it away once you have it. I think there is plenty to be learned from this, though it will be hard to disassociate other factors in sales and availability. Ultimately the normalising number I will need is evidence of actual play, and you can’t command that and you can’t even know what percentage of actual play is reported. So it will be hard to draw conclusions from this unless the results are dramatic.

–BMurray

(NB, the canonical version of this complete with notes from the players is at the wiki.)

So I winged a little session with my table (who are the most wonderful, smart, and tolerant people I know) in the Deluge setting. I wanted to get playing fast, so I went with ORE because I can play it on the fly, twisting its mechanisms as needed to solve problems. While I love FATE for hacking games I want to make, when I want to just play now, I dig ORE for a lot of reasons. One of those will become apparent and underscore why ORE, especially the stuff in Reign, rocks the house when you’re winging something new and fragile.

So anyway, I started my prep like this (and this is fairly typical for me if you abstract it) — I made up one great image I wanted to deliver. Actually I wound up with two but one was easy to hand off. The first was bipedal intelligent bears. The idea of a smart bear in a fight has always given me a kick, especially if it’s in armour. I’ve used it before and I’ll use it again. My preference is for polar bears, but in the jungle you make do. The second was the image of buildings partially submerged in the water — looking out to see and seeing the shadows of the city recede under the waves, the tops of a few standing above the water. A city can be no more ruined, in my books, than to be intact but placed so completely out of utility like this. I got an awesome third image for free once we got playing.

Now one of the things I want Deluge to do is make you use your home town to play in. As I thought about this on my commute this morning I realised it’s flawed — if you live inland, it won’t be nearly as interesting an exercise so I need to think about that. I live in Vancouver, though, which is a post-apocalyptic wonderland as I’ve found before (and before and before). So I went to the Firetree flood map site, zoomed in on Vancouver, and set the sea level rise to the max — 14 meters. I printed that off (and that’s already pretty haunting as half the map is ghosted with grey, just as though actually underwater) and sketched over it with felt pen, outlining the islands and greening in the jungle and farmland.

That’s basically my prep.

Once the gang was together and fed and settled down I plonked a bowl of ten-sided dice and the map on the table and said, “It started raining in 2011 and it never stopped. It’s now 2167 and you live in this new world of overgrown half-dead cities surrounded by wilderness.” Then I briefly described each of the Deluge pseudo classes — Mail Carrier, Scout, Hired Gun, Scavenger, and Trader and asked them to pick one.

Tim picked Hired Gun and named him Chu.

Byron picked Mail Carrier and named him Arbin.

JB picked Scout and named him Gunnar (accidentally setting off a cascade of nordic names).

I then named the six Reign stats — BODY, COORDINATION, COMMAND, KNOWLEDGE, CHARM, and SENSE and asked them to just set these at whatever they wanted. They did, keeping in mind their class which was already delivering some ideas about who the character is and what shape it will take. I trusted that they would use this freedom to describe rather than empower and was not disappointed. Nonetheless I did have an ace hidden. With stats laid down I asked them to pick five skills, assign them to stats, and rank them from 1 to 5. They did. Some treated them like aspects, some like simple skills. Whatever, that didn’t matter to me.

Once done with that, we calculated the point cost for these characters so far. One was 100 points, another 80, and another 70. So I set the point cap at 100 and let them buy up (or down and up) the rest of the character. Interestingly, while some skills got jiggered, Tim spent most of his 70 points on gear, including a 5-point firearm which obviously had to be very awesome. Oh and an attack dog. So Chu, the bodyguard (Hired Gun) goes everywhere with a monstrous custom-built four-cylinder .55 calibre revolver and a pit-bull. He also has an ancient and heavily annotated IHOP map of Vancouver. Chu is already awesome and we haven’t even half done character generation.

Arbin, the Mail Carrier has few points to work with as his stats are very high, and spends little, but his high stats are already defining him as smart and charming — he’s not just a mailman but also a kind of diplomat. A point got spent for Status, so he’s known.

Gunnar, the scout, is also fun. JB chooses to spend three points in Status, which gives him a very high social rank. This is consistent with the description of the Scout class, but it’s also underscoring an idea I have always had about player rewards in games like this: players really get off on other characters in game praising, deferring to, and generally treat well their characters. Having read a lot of Dennett I suspect this is because when we simulate being praised we use the same brain-kit that we use when actually being praised, and so the happy pride we feel is genuine and not simulated. And everyone loves to be praised. So JB invested in getting praised or at least deferred to. Naturally this is also a conflict pump because status also engenders jealousy. Again, a cool character, armed with a sword-cane.

Finally I get the passions down. This part of Reign is something I adore, love, cherish, and otherwise gush over. Some games mechanize the hell out of this kind of thing (to good effect; I like those games too — but I play Reign, because if you can do the same thing but simpler, I’ll use simpler every time) but this system is austere:

Pick your Duty. This is the thing you always do. It’s the heart of your character. Whenever you act in pursuit of your Duty, you get an extra die on the roll. Chu gets “Keep my charge safe at all costs”. Arbin gets “Get the mail through”. Gunnar gets “Open new territory and map the hell out of it.” I note that these are strictly class-aligned and that’s good. I want the classes in Deluge to shortcut these kinds of decisions because they can be (unnecessarily) stumbling blocks. I don’t want to mechanize it, though, because Deluge is supposed to be system-agnostic. I do want to point it out as an interface point. I take notes.

Pick you Craving. This is the thing you feel compelled to do. It’s in the reptile-brain of your character. It’s probably shameful and destructive. But when you are pursuing your Craving you get a dies on skill checks. It’s powerful. Players are encouraged to indulge. Chu gets “Loves to kill” and suddenly changes from a cool bodyguard guy to a wild dog on a shitty leash. Six kinds of awesome. Arbin gets “Euphoric fungus addiction”. Could get interesting. And Gunnar gets “The wives and daughters of highly placed persons.” Holy crap, that gives a ref something to work with.

The third Passion in Reign is Mission but I don’t like the players picking that — I want that to be my opportunity as the referee to declare my interests and make them part of the reward cycle for the players. Most games assume that players will do what you ask them to or, worse, decode what you’re implying they ought to do and then do it. This is, in my experience, horse-shit. Mostly the decoding part. I am far happier narrating the mission scene and then saying point-blank, player-to-player, “This is your mission. You get an extra die on any check that is advancing your mission.”

So I narrate the opening scene. The trio are in a functional democratic enclave in West Vancouver that has sporadic electricity and good access to fishing and farming and scavenging. They control the route to Lion’s Bay and further into the rich regions past Whistler. Arbin and Chu have worked together ever since Arbin started delivering mail. Gunnar is new but is interested in opening up the eastern portions of his map and knows much of the nearby area. Arbin and Chu hire him to accompany them. The leader of the West Vancouver enclave has given them mail that must reach the technocrats at Burnaby Mountain. Mission: “Get the mail to Burnaby Mountain unmolested.” Done!

They set out, intending to reach a village they know is near Lonsdale that fishes the region and can proved passage across the narrow part of the inlet to Commercial. They enter the endless rain, protected by their leather ponchos and wide-brimmed hats, and march eastwards to Lonsdale.  Perhaps half-way there, on a heavily overgrown roadway with jungle choking it to a mere path, Chu spots movement ahead and to the left. He stops the group silently and peers into the leafy shadows and sharply gasps.

Now, Reign has no sanity mechanism so I invent one on the fly. I like zero-summing sanity off Knowledge, so Sanity (or Stability, or Cool) is five minus Knowledge. In retrospect six might be better. Anyway, everyone makes their checks, pulling dice in from their Missions and in some cases Duty. In the overgrown shell of a building ahead is a bear standing on its hind legs and apparently manipulating a pair of binoculars. And it shouts, “Who goes there?” A talking bear?!

Tim is awesome. He is prepared to, as a player, take the risks that make gaming awesome. He looks at his Craving — “I like killing” and shoots the bear. It’s a fucking bear! BOOM!

JB and Byron are appalled but Byron recovers first. He’s already noted that Arbin and Chu have worked together a lot, so this is his dog slipping the lead and sometimes you just have to let the dog run. So he readies his bow in case it’s needed. JB is stunned and is actively interested in what these bear-creatures are (especially as this is not quite what he was expecting from the setting). So he STABS CHU WITH HIS SWORD CANE.

I’m cool with PvP. And in selecting such an extreme Craving, Tim had to expect that something like this could be a result — hell it’s not a very good craving if it doesn’t make things complicated. I note some XP for both JB and Tim for their guts in confronting this scene head on in a cool way. I had planned a fairly boring little introduction scene here to show my bear image.

Chu blasts a round into the bear’s center mass as another two step into view (3×6, his revolver does Width+1 Killing).  Gunnar, shouting obscenities, tries to smash the gun out of Chu’s hand with his sword cane but fails (he gets a set but it’s slower than Chu’s — the stroke arrives to late). Arbin tries talk Chu down but Chu is not interested (no sets). The bear is pissed and charges. His pals charge too.

The bear with the binoculars tears into Chu while Chu fires again, blowing the bear’s head off. The other bears are not in range yet but are clearly intent on murder. Arbin tries to separate them by firing at one with the intent of keeping Chu from a one-on-three disaster and succeeds — he does no damage but the bear heads his way. Gunnar, frustrated beyond measure with Chu, shucks the sword-cane’s cane part and stabs Chu in the kidneys.

Chu collapses (chest full with shock and killing) unable to breathe with a stabbed kidney and three broken ribs. Arbin tries to talk down the bear that’s charging him — “My companion is an idiot! We meant no harm! Please stop and let us salvage this situation! I carry the mail!” — with a diplomatic skill check. Arbin stops stabbing Chu and gives a die to Arbin in support of defusing the situation. The bears intend to kill.

Byron gets a nice high and wide roll and uses his diplomacy to knock dice out of the bear’s attack rolls. It’s successful, so the bears will stop attacking, but now we’re seeing how much harm they inflict before they come to their senses and try to civilize this situation. He knocks all the sets out of the one attacking him — it stops and tries to stop its companion — but can only knock out one set of three on the other, so before stopping its attack, that bear tears into Chu’s arm as he desperately tries to defend himself, shattered and bleeding though he is.

And so, heads cooling, they head in to shelter. Chu is given barely adequate attention by the bears’  surgeon. They don’t care if he dies. But Arbin and Chu are able to work with the bears and exchange information. Most crucially, perhaps, the bears also want mail moved to Burnaby Mountain, and so they need these three. In payment for Chu’s error, they agree to add the bears to their mail route and establish a connection between them and West Vancouver. They discover that the Lonsdale village is gone but that some boats may remain. And they discover that the bears are new to this region — none has a conscious memory of their lives more than 18 months prior, and that they survive here by fishing the inlet and by diving on the ruined buildings off-shore (there’s image three that I didn’t anticipate: bears in boats and brass-and-canvas diving suits with hand-pumped compressors). They have a rich store of trade goods and connecting with West Vancouver officially will be very valuable for them. It is agreed, and so Arbin and Gunnar help Chu limp on towards Lonsdale. We note that there is a new mystery to revisit: WTF TALKING BEARS?! I assuage fears that we are in Gamma World loonie mutation territory — we are not: the characters have never ever seen such a thing. The weirdest thing any of them has seen is an angel, and that was distant and in silhouette.

At the Lonsdale enclave there is barely even evidence that anyone ever lived there since the city itself fell. But there are some intact boats, and Arbin is a skilled sailor they cross the inlet in daylight and are met on the other side by a fishing fleet from Commercial, who guides them in on learning they are mail carriers. I pay off JB’s investment here too: “Goodness, you must be Gunnar, the famed Scout! We are honoured to house you! Please come in for food and rest and aid! Meet my daughters! What luck for us, sir!” I get a critical success.

They lounge well at Commercial and Chu gets some good medical attention, binding up his broken ribs and improving measurably. Arbin conducts his mail business, dropping off mail from West Vancouver and from the bears intended for Commercial and picking up mail with destinations on his path. Gunnar mixes it up with the daughters. A few days are spent well but eventually it is time to move on.

Chu awakes early on their day of departure and notes a team leaving the village and heading East through the farmworks. Two of them have rifles, which is unusual. East is also the direction Chu and company intend. He scowls.

As they prepare to leave, Chu brings up the departing team and they agree that this is interesting. They discuss it with the leader, Torvald, and he says he’s unaware of a hunting party heading East — that’s not even a good direction to go as it heads into the farmland of the technocracy and they usually hunt west into the wilds of the End. All are skeptical — it seems unlikely that the leader would be unaware of the deployment of his precious rifles. They depart, but move with caution.

The terrain around, soaked and green of course, is lined with low property boundaries formed from the rubble what was once a city. While most of the wood has long since rotted to mud, the concrete and re-bar form a frame for wild growth, and so the territory is a haphazard grid of hard-cored hedges. And within these boundaries are crops suited for the wet — rice and cranberries, radish and cucumber. The rain beats down mercilessly for an hour’s walk and then a shot rings out just as Chu spots the rifleman ahead. Chu is hit, but trivially, and charges the attacker while Arbin prepares his bow. Gunnar hides, unable to bring his sword-cane to bear at this range. I choose to model this group as minions — there are six of them, so I will roll six dice and interpret results, using my sets to do whatever I want with the NPCs. Chu lobs one of his precious grenades towards them ineffectively — it explodes far off to the right with a useless thump in the mud. Arbin hits one of the attacker, ruining a set and killing (or running off) a man. Chu is shot through the leg.

Chu, close now, draws his revolver and Bowie knife and chooses to attack with each. He’s got a lot of dice to throw around, pursuing all of his Passions in one go, and can afford to lose one. He kills two more before any can react. Gunnar assists Arbin by calling out targets, but Arbin is unable to score a hit.

Down to three attackers, the opposition is pretty ineffective but Chu is intent on murder. As Gunnar and Arbin close, Chu kills two more, hacking and booming. Arbin manages to pull him off the last before he can complete his fury. The last begs for mercy, revealing that his hunting party was sent by Skald, chief hunstman at Commercial to waylay them. Skald, it seems, is jealous of Torvald and does not want the mail going through to Burnaby. Or perhaps wants to send a different message. The wet and bloody trio elect to take this man to Burnaby and give him to the technocrats there to deal with, hopefully sealing Skald’s fate.

And that’s it, from character creation through two combats and three cool images. As always, Reign’s passion system delivers with utmost simplicity — players act in their interest which is, uncontroversially, succeeding within the context of the game’s story rather than in the meta-context of advancing their characters. I love love love this. And because I held Mission for myself, they also consistently act in pursuit of the goal I handed out, and eagerly, so I can focus my ad-lib and meagre prep on that rather than trying to anticipate every possibility.

And of course my players delivered by agreeing to be awesome. Thanks guys.

–BMurray

Late edit: someone asked for a scan of my map. Here you go!

Map of Vancouver under 14m of water.